Murder Out of Turn Page 12

  He had flushed a little at her manner, but now he was entirely calm.

  “Quite clear,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “And you see they haven’t anything to do with the murders, don’t you?” she said. “They are just innocent drawings of tall women in dresses.”

  “Yes, I see,” Weigand agreed. “How did you get out? The troopers were supposed to stop you.”

  Nobody, she said, had tried to stop her. Arthur Kennedy had explained to one of the troopers that he had to drive into Brewster for provisions, and she had simply got in the car and come along.

  “On the floor, I suppose?” Weigand said, very politely.

  She looked at him, and something like a smile appeared.

  “Well,” she said, “I found that a shoe-lace was untied when we happened to be passing the troopers and I sort of bent over.”

  Weigand said, “Oh,” and looked at her shoes. The shoes were quite innocent of laces. Her glance followed his and remained undisturbed.

  “I have quite a bit of trouble with them,” she assured him. “You can see that I might?”

  They would, Weigand agreed gravely, be a nuisance. There was half a smile in his eyes, and in hers; if not a smile, an abatement of distance. Weigand said that she made his course rather difficult.

  “I could take you back to the lake, of course,” he pointed out. “My authority runs that far, if you were doubting it. But I have other things to do, and I don’t suppose you’d stay.”

  Her expression was clearly that of a person who would not stay. She waited, expectantly.

  “Or,” Weigand said, “I can leave you alone to catch your train, of course.”

  “Yes,” Dorian Hunt said, “you can do that, can’t you?”

  “Or,” Weigand went on, “I can drive you in, since I’m going anyway, and at least keep an eye on you for a time.” He looked at her speculatively. “That might be best,” he agreed with himself. “Come on.”

  “Are you,” Dorian wanted to know, “telling me or asking me, Lieutenant Weigand?”

  Weigand thought it over.

  “Oh,” he said, “asking. I’ll get you in quicker, if that matters.”

  He waited her reply, he discovered, with unexpected interest.

  “Well,” she said, “not unless we start.”

  She tied up the drawings and waited while Weigand tossed coins on the fountain counter. She went, he was interested to notice, at once to his car, parked a little way down the street. Her assurance revealed a couple of things—she had identified his car at camp, she had noticed it before she entered the drugstore. Wondering a little what that meant, he held the door open for her, walked to the driver’s seat, slid the car backward into traffic and forward along Main Street, turning around the traffic stanchion in front of the station. They were rolling downhill, picking up speed, when she spoke.

  “Well,” she said, “are you finding out things?”

  He looked at her. She was looking ahead, presenting an attractive profile. He looked ahead and forked onto Route 22, picking up speed. He said that, oh yes, he was finding out things.

  “Too many things,” he added, abstractedly. “That you knew which car was mine, for example.”

  She turned and looked at him, and he could feel her looking. But he kept his eyes soberly on the curve ahead.

  “Oh,” she said, “I notice things. That’s all.”

  He let the remark drop between them, dispassionately. They rolled on, picking up speed. They covered some miles in silence. Then Dorian Hunt mentioned, politely, that he drove fast and he said absently that he was in a hurry. He wondered whether he had been maneuvered, and if he had, why? And at the same time it was, he decided, pleasant to have her beside him, for whatever reason of her own.

  “Do you like being a policeman?” she asked, suddenly. “I should think a man would rather sweep streets.”

  The tone was sharp, but it was at the same time rather puzzled. With the road straight ahead, Weigand could turn his head to look at her. She, too, had turned—she was looking at him in what appeared to be a kind of perplexity.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Doesn’t it fit?”

  He was surprised that she flushed, just perceptibly.

  “Oh,” she said, “I hadn’t thought, particularly. Don’t you fit?”

  Weigand, his eyes back on the road, nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, “I fit—the facts, anyway. Not your ideas, perhaps. And I don’t mind being a policeman.”

  “Well, if you must know,” she said, “that’s what I don’t understand. I should think you would—I should think anybody would. I should think that hounding people, trying to trick them, trying to catch them out and hurt them—I should think nobody would want to do that.” Her voice was bitter, now; although she was quiet, she was the Dorian Hunt who had flared so angrily when the cat stood before all of them, with his captured, dangling rabbit.

  “Watch the curve!” she said quickly. Weigand, who had, he guiltily realized, not been watching the curve, braked sharply. He was embarrassed, and a little annoyed.

  There was a longish pause. It took them more miles on a hilly, turning road. The speedometer needle hesitated at sixty and climbed to sixty-five. They went over a crest at close to seventy, and held it. There was something savage in their movement, but Weigand was unconscious of it. Weigand believed that he was thinking, quite calmly. They were twisting toward Pines Bridge along a sharply winding road by the reservoirs before he spoke. Then he said that her attitude was, as she must know, quite unreasonable.

  “There is no point in arguing it,” he said, using unconsciously the phrase which is the inevitable precursor of argument; feeling conscious, more than of anything else—more than of the car, which responded mechanically to movements which he made in forgetfulness; more than of the road—of the slender young woman sitting so easily beside him. Her body seemed, he thought, to trim itself to the movement of the car as when she walked it trimmed itself to its own motion. She was looking ahead when, as he talked, he lifted his eyes now and then from the road to look at her. But he felt that, at times, she was looking at him; that her gaze swerved always only an instant before his turned to her.

  They were riding now, he told her, with no more danger than it was his responsibility to guard against, because there were policemen around them. She thought of individual policemen, but it was not a question of individual policemen. That now she was, to be sure, dependent for safety against the only dangers threatening—“like the curve back there,” he admitted—on one man who happened to be a policeman was beside the point. But that no molestation threatened them from without was because of a kind of abstract policemen, of police. Here, in the country; in the city, where they were going. That she could walk through New York, through men of all kinds and all impulses, and walk with no great danger, was because of the police. It was hard to visualize, unless you happened to be a policeman. You thought of traffic policemen, sometimes abusive and bullying—

  “And sometimes very pleasant,” she interjected, unexpectedly. “I see traffic policemen.”

  “Then,” he told her, “you see all policemen. They keep things running in safe paths. They prevent head-on conflicts of interest. They maintain a pattern of order and, in peaceful times, it is maintained well enough so that we do not suspect that order is not any more natural than disorder.”

  “‘And I, my lords, embody the law,’” she said. But her voice was gentler than it had been.

  “Yes,” he said. “You can make anything sound silly, pretentious. But I—lieutenant of detectives, no brighter than the next, no more honest, God knows no stronger or anything—I embody the law. I do, and the rookie just out of police school, and the commissioner, just as the magistrate who fines a street-walker and the justice who sits in the Supreme Court—we all embody the law. And we aren’t, I grant you, always up to it. We haven’t the temperaments for it, or the minds, or the honesty; we get excited and shoot when we shouldn�
��t. We’re given guns and clubs and authority, and we’re no safer with such things than other men. As individuals, that is. But we embody the law; we embody order and direction, and a compulsion against violence. We make it possible—”

  “Curve!” the girl said. There was an undercurrent of merriment in her voice.

  Weigand braked and said, “Damn!” and then, because there was no curve to speak of, laughed.

  “Well,” she said, “there could have been, for all you knew. You’re a funny sort of policeman, aren’t you?”

  She was looking at him, now, and smiling quietly. He felt rather absurd, but also obscurely contented.

  “Right,” he said. “But you started me.”

  She nodded. Then the smile faded to a ghost and she looked ahead again. She said it was all right, as he said it, which was the way a man would say it. But it was all very abstract, and fine.

  “And we don’t live in abstractions,” she said. “It is all a matter of individuals. And that, the law never understands.”

  “How can it?” he said, and slowed to circle onto the Parkway. “Law can’t be made for individuals, as individuals. There can’t be a law for you and a law for me, except in our minds. There has to be one law covering both of us, like a blanket. Maybe our feet will stick out, but—”

  He stopped because she was laughing.

  “Why, Mr. Weigand!” she said.

  He grinned at her, and found that he was not abashed.

  “That’s what I mean by law,” he said. “It only stops me from acting against your law. It doesn’t stop me from thinking—unconsciously.”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s very nice of you, in a way, Mr.—what is your name, anyway?”

  “William,” he said. “A distressing name. Or Bill.”

  “It’s very nice of you, Bill Weigand,” she told him. “Don’t think we girls don’t appreciate—”

  She let it fall, and Weigand found that her words—or perhaps merely her presence—tingled inside somewhere.

  “For God’s sake!” Weigand said to himself, in alarmed astonishment. “For God’s sake! Is it going to turn out that way?”

  He shied off, suddenly.

  “The police—” he began, and she turned and laughed at him, for a moment only.

  “Don’t sound so worried,” she said. “I’m not going to divert you.” The laughter faded. “Or any policeman,” she said, and unexpectedly the bitterness was back in her voice. “For all their fine words, they—hunt people.” She was suddenly passionate. “I’ve seen it, I tell you!” she said. “I’ve seen it.”

  Weigand felt that he had climbed slowly up some slippery surface only to slide down it again.

  “Right,” he said. “I’m sorry, Miss Hunt.”

  She had not moved, but she seemed to have receded along the seat. His ankle flexed and the foot pressed the accelerator. The car’s song heightened and he took it, fast, around two cars toiling along abreast, snapping back into line below the crest of a hill.

  “Well,” she said, “you don’t need to kill us, Mr. Weigand.”

  He decided that she didn’t make sense; that she was already an aggravation. He pointed out, curtly, that he was in a hurry. “After all, I’m a policeman,” he said, and the anger in his tone sounded preposterous to himself. She said nothing, but stared ahead. It was all, Weigand told himself without being able to do anything about it, very silly. It remained silly for another thirty miles.

  She told him Forty-second and Fifth, because she wanted to stop at the library for a moment. She was out quickly when he stopped by the curb in front of the library lions. As she stood on the sidewalk, closing the door, he was astonished to remember that he had been so peculiarly irritated. She stood with a hand on the door.

  “Well,” she said, “thank you, Lieutenant.”

  He was surprised again to find himself speaking.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I seem to have been very irritable. I—well, I’m probably tightened up over the case.”

  She said she was sure that that was it, and that so, of course, was she.

  “Something seems to have got into us,” she said, and then she stopped and her eyes widened slowly as they looked into his. Then, for no reason, she started shaking her head. She shook it with a kind of determination for a moment, and then more slowly and at the end a little doubtfully. Bill Weigand looked at her, and he wasn’t irritated at all, any more, or puzzled. He waited, with a kind of sureness, for her to say something.

  It was a moment before he realized that she was not going to say anything, which was all right, too. It meant that the thing she was not going to say was the only thing left to say; that there was no side step available. There would be time, he thought, to admit what her silence agreed had eventually to be admitted. Meanwhile he looked at her and began to smile a little, and thought her eyes widened.

  She looked at him a moment longer through widened eyes and then, with quick grace, she turned away and he watched her run up the steps toward the library. It occurred to him that he could not remember ever having seen a woman who looked so attractive, from behind, while running up stairs. It was, he thought, almost a violation of the laws of nature.

  He watched her until she disappeared through the library doors and then loop-turned in the avenue to the indignation of several taxicabs and two buses. He turned right again in Forty-second, thinking about Dorian, and, to make a left turn in Lexington against a red light and the law’s specific interdiction, let his siren hum faintly. He drove up Lexington a block or two and edged to the curb between two No Parking signs. Bell, Halpern & Bell had picked themselves a sufficiently overpowering building.

  He found the firm’s name in the directory and started toward the elevators. Then he stopped, considering. There was inner amusement in his eyes as he went, instead, toward a telephone booth. “After all,” he told himself, “if I embody the law, there is no reason why the law shouldn’t embody me, too.” He dialed SPring 7-3100. His nickel returned to the little cup and he pocketed it and told Police Headquarters that Weigand was calling, and wanted to speak to Deputy Chief Inspector O’Malley, in Homicide. He repeated this desire to O’Malley’s secretary. O’Malley came on, gruffly, and said he thought Weigand was on vacation, for God’s sake. Weigand said he had thought so, too, but that he had run into something.

  “Up in Putnam County,” he said.

  “Jeez, Bill,” O’Malley said, relaxing, “how’d you stumble into that?”

  Weigand told him. O’Malley said it sounded like quite a business, and Weigand agreed that it was quite a business.

  “But,” O’Malley reminded him, “you’re on leave, remember. So it’s nothing to us how you spend it.”

  That, Weigand said, was the point. Sure enough, he was on leave. “Only,” he said, “there are naturally several points in town that need to be checked.”

  O’Malley made suspicious sounds.

  “And,” Weigand explained, “if the State Police ask us to cooperate, we’ll cooperate, of course. Which might take several men—who aren’t on leave. This way, I’m saving the Department a man and—”

  O’Malley got it.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “Mullins,” Weigand told him. “Just Detective Mullins. Can you send him along?”

  Inspector O’Malley spluttered for a minute, while Weigand waited politely, as lieutenants must wait while deputy chief inspectors do their spluttering. Then O’Malley said, not too cordially, that he could have Mullins.

  “For a day or two,” O’Malley warned.

  Weigand returned to the switchboard by O’Malley’s secretary, got onto Mullins. Mullins was surprised, and when he heard that the Norths were in it broke into words.

  “Jeez, Loot,” he said. “Is it a screwy one again?”

  Weigand said you could call it that, and told Mullins to meet him at Bell, Halpern & Bell’s.

  13

  MONDAY

  11:40 A.M. TO 1:10 P.M.


  The second Mr. Bell—Mr. J. K. Bell, as it turned out—was unavoidably engaged for half an hour, which he trusted would not inconvenience Lieutenant Weigand. Meanwhile, nobody had been in the large office which had belonged to Jean Corbin, or the smaller one which had been Thelma Smith’s until five o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, the eighth inst., or been allowed to open the desk in the general office at which Helen Wilson had worked. Possibly the lieutenant would care to occupy his time in one of the offices?

  The lieutenant cared. Jean Corbin had worked in a large and just now sunny office, and had had a wide desk facing outward from the windows. Her secretary had had a smaller desk, not facing outward from the windows. Both desks were bare of surface and, within, orderly. Sitting at the big desk, Weigand flipped through papers—typed and annotated advertisements, layouts neatly filed and also annotated; memos printed “From Miss Jean Corbin to..……”; pads of yellow paper and lines of sharpened pencils, prepared against the time of creation. And nothing very personal—a box of kleenex; an immaculate and folded towel; a key marked, modestly, “Exec. T.” On the desk a fountain-pen set and a memorandum calendar, with “Sat. 9–Sun. 10” virginal on top. Weigand flicked the calendar idly to Monday, wondering what task lay there which would, now, never be performed. There was a single notation:

  “Fil. 1–21”

  Weigand looked at it thoughtfully, and wondered whether it might apply.

  It was, presumably, something which was to have been done, or been remembered, on that day, Monday, September 11. Therefore, presumably, “1–21” did not mean what it at first seemed to mean, unless Miss Corbin had been thinking a good way ahead. “Fil.”—whatever “Fil.” might be—was not to be encountered on January 21, unless—He flipped to the last sheet on the pad and found it, as he had supposed, to bear the date of December 31. So, naturally, the following January would appear only on the following desk pad; thus any memorandum for a January date might be jotted down anywhere for subsequent transfer. But in that case, why not on the sheet for December 31, which would be torn off last? And, if this cryptic reference was to some engagement for a January which had now, so far as it concerned Jean Corbin, turned grimly mythical, why was he puzzling over it?