Murder within Murder Read online

  “As to whether it’s true,” he said, “I don’t know. I suppose there’s truth in it.”

  “Did you ever feel that way?” Pam said.

  Jerry shrugged. He said not very strongly. Not since he was much younger.

  “But you wanted to get into it,” Pam said. “I know you did.”

  That had been for other reasons, Jerry said. As she knew, he said.

  “Altogether?” Pam said.

  “Oh yes,” Jerry said. “As far as I know.”

  “I think,” Pam said, “that Mr. Hill really feels that way. He’s very small, for a man. It might be—like Mr. Purdy’s name. That could be why he wears a beard.”

  “To give distinction,” Jerry said. “Yes, I’ve always supposed so. In his case. Not that he needs it.”

  Perhaps, Pamela North said, he wanted to be distinguished in some other way; perhaps he wanted to live some other way. Perhaps he—oh, wanted to fly an airplane in combat. Be a knight. Live dangerously.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “he was really talking about himself. Perhaps.…”

  She stopped suddenly.

  “Did he know Miss Gipson?” she said.

  Jerry looked at her. His eyes widened. He said, “For God’s sake, Pam!”

  “All right,” Pam said, “did he?”

  Jerry said that they had met, certainly. As he told her. Miss Gipson had gone to see Mr. Hill to talk over the case he was going to write. He didn’t suppose they had become fast friends from that.

  “Or,” he said, “fast enemies. Listen, Pam—”

  Pam said she was only exploring possibilities.

  “Suppose,” she said, “Mr. Hill was really talking about himself. Suppose he really decided that he wanted to be in danger to … what did he say? Face the bright edge of danger. And suppose he decided that he might as well begin by killing Miss Gipson.”

  “Nonsense,” Jerry said. “I never heard—”

  “And of course,” she went on, as if she did not hear him, “he does profit in a way. He gets a story to write … a very good story. And I think he would appreciate the irony … writing up, ostensibly from the outside, a murder of which he was really on the inside. Speculating about motives, approaching the truth and shying away from it, tempting discovery and avoiding it, leaving—”

  “Pam!” Jerry said. He spoke very decisively. “Pam! Alexander Hill is a well-known, reputable, professional writer. He has a skilled and trained imagination, which he uses in his work. He can run up speculations at the drop of a fact, and does. He is not a—a thrill murderer.”

  “Do you know he isn’t?” Pam said.

  “Of course,” Jerry told her. She looked at him, and waited. “Don’t be technical,” he said. “Of course I don’t know he isn’t. He just—isn’t.”

  “He was very sure the person who killed Miss Gipson won’t be caught,” Pam pointed out. “Why was he so sure? Unless he had reason to be sure?”

  Jerry said that it was a case of the wish being father. He said Mr. Hill wanted it unsolved, because it worked out better for him.

  “He specializes in unsolved murders,” he said and caught himself, but realized he had not caught himself in time.

  “I wonder if he does,” Pam said, gently. Then she said it was time to feed the cat. She said the cat was supposed to eat four or five times a day for a while.

  “By the way,” Jerry said, “how about us?”

  They were going out, Pam told him. If they expected to get anything to eat, they were going out. There was barely enough in the house for the little cat.

  Inspector O’Malley had been difficult, which was characteristic. He had wanted somebody arrested. It always made him nervous when hours went by without anybody’s being arrested. He had pointed out that the newspapers were apt to get annoyed; he had said that it was time Weigand used his head.

  “We ain’t keeping it alive,” O’Malley said. “That’s the trouble with you, Bill. You don’t keep ’em alive. Here it is almost a day after she got knocked off, and where’s your morning paper lead?” He had looked at Bill Weigand, but not as if expecting an answer. “They expect it,” he said. “I tell them progress, sure. I tell them we are questioning suspects, sure. I tell them she had a niece and a nephew who inherit her money, sure. I tell them we’re investigating a couple of letters found in her apartment, sure. But where’s the lead?”

  Weigand said he was sorry. O’Malley said sure he was sorry. He said that didn’t give the mornings a lead, did it? He pointed out that the papers had a lot more space nowadays than they had had and that there couldn’t be a better time for a good murder.

  “Reflecting credit,” he said. “Reflecting credit, Lieutenant.”

  Weigand did not smile. He knew that Inspector O’Malley liked to be the focus of reflected credit. He knew the commissioner liked it, and the mayor. It was to be expected. Elections might depend on it.

  “It ain’t as if you didn’t have evidence, Bill,” Inspector O’Malley said, and his tone was confidential and aggrieved. “This teacher who was hanging around—this Spencer. With a fool false name and a grudge against the dame. And no alibi for the girl’s killing. At the library again! Are we supposed to fall for that?”

  “He was at the library,” Bill Weigand said. “He turned in a slip. Bound volumes of The New Yorker, October and November, 1932.”

  “Why the hell does he want to read that book?” Inspector O’Malley said.

  “He says it amuses him,” Weigand reported, without inflection.

  “Wisecracks,” O’Malley said. “Smart alecks. Hasn’t he got anything better to do?”

  “Apparently not,” Weigand said. “Of course, we don’t know what he was doing. He needn’t have stayed in the library. We just know he was there. We’re trying to find out more.”

  “O.K.,” O’Malley had said. “How about the girl? This niece. The one who wrote the letter.”

  So far as they knew, Weigand told him, she was having lunch with her husband at Twenty-one. That was what they said they were doing.

  “We’re trying to find out more,” he said, a little wearily. “Also about her brother, who says he ate lunch somewhere on Madison Avenue and doesn’t remember the name of the restaurant, but thinks it was between Fiftieth and Fifty-fourth somewhere, and is sure it was on the west side of the street.”

  “God!” Inspector O’Malley had said, not pleased.

  As for Mrs. Willard Burt, who also had written a letter to Miss Gipson, she had been shopping during the time when somebody had shot Florence Adams to death. She had gone to several stores and was not sure when she had been at any of them. There was no corroboration—not even the unsatisfactory one Nora Frost received from her husband; unsatisfactory not because of any lack of emphasis, but because of the source. Willard Burt had been at lunch, alone, a man with whom he had had a business appointment having been unable to make it.

  “You go off on the damnedest wild-goose chases sometimes,” O’Malley said crossly. “Merely because a couple of women have a misunderstanding and one of them writes a letter to the other, you have to look into it.” He looked at Weigand severely. “It’s the girl or her brother,” he said. “They get the money, don’t they? Or just possibly this schoolteacher, Simpson.” He thawed a little. “Concentrate, Bill,” he said. “You fly all over. Comes from letting the Norths in on things, probably.”

  It was, Weigand said, inevitable that they be in on this, to some extent.

  “O.K.,” O’Malley said. “But don’t pay any attention to them. They’re O.K., I guess, but God knows they’re screwy.” O’Malley sighed, reflecting. “Always have been,” he said. “Leave them out and get on with it, Lieutenant.”

  Bill had said, “Yes sir,” and gone back to his own office. Detective Sergeant Stein was waiting for him. Bill felt momentarily guilty, because Stein had just been spending several hours investigating a Pam North hunch—one that even she admitted to be a hunch.

  And his investigation had had no concl
usive results.

  Mrs. Thomas Merton, daughter of Timothy and Agatha Fleming, had divorced her husband after a second jury had failed to make up its mind whether he was responsible for the fatal epidemic in the big white house up the Hudson. She had shortly thereafter gone abroad—that had been late in ’29. That was as late into her life as police records went; she had never returned to the Fleming house, which had subsequently been sold through her attorneys. It was not even certain that she was still alive.

  “Obviously,” Stein said, “we can check further. She may have come back any time; she may be living around the corner. It wouldn’t necessarily show up.”

  That was true, of course. Weigand nodded.

  Mrs. Willard Burt had also been abroad between the wars. She had gone alone as Mrs. Helen Roberts, widow. She had returned just before the war and had gone to live in California, where she lived quietly—but by no means surreptitiously—and alone. She had been married to Mr. Burt in the spring of 1944 and they had come to New York. Mr. Burt had lived for some years in California, comfortably enough in a Los Angeles apartment. He was generally supposed to be a widower, although he had never confided details to his acquaintances, who were numerous but apparently not close. He had apparently lived on an entirely adequate income; he invested, conservatively, in the market and was presumed to have enhanced his income somewhat thereby.

  There was nothing which made it physically impossible that Helen Merton and Helen Burt were the same person. There was nothing that proved they were. There were pictures of Helen Merton at thirty, and there was nothing in her face or body which made it impossible that she be Helen Burt at forty-seven. Weigand studied the pictured face. The two women—if they were two women—were not different in type. And seventeen years made changes. Were the eyes similarly set? Weigand thought possibly they were. But it was only a possibility. He had a deep distrust of identifications made from photographs; he had seen too many of them made mistakenly. If he had a photograph, taken at approximately the same angle, of Mrs. Burt; if he had the two together; if measurements were made—then he would know more. It might come to that; a sidewalk photographer might snap Mrs. Burt as she left her apartment and they might have the material for comparison. They would see whether it came to that.

  He thanked Stein and sent him home to dinner. He sat at his desk, drumming it gently with his fingers and wondered who had killed Amelia Gipson. Then the telephone rang.

  “This is John Gipson,” the voice said. “I want to see you—now, if possible.”

  “Why?” Weigand said.

  “About Nora,” Gipson said. “She’s willing for me to tell you about the letter.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Come along.”

  “I’m across the street,” John Gipson said. “I’ll come along.”

  10

  WEDNESDAY, 7:15 P.M. TO 8:05 P.M.

  John Gipson looked around Bill Weigand’s office, where most things were worn and almost all were a little dusty. He did not seem impressed.

  “Look, Lieutenant,” he said, “I don’t want to be rude or anything. But are you the right man to talk to?”

  Bill smiled, faintly. He said that if it was to talk in answer to a question he had asked, he should think he was.

  “What do you want to talk about?” Bill said.

  John Gipson said that Weigand knew damn well what he wanted to talk about.

  “I want to tell somebody what the letter—why Nora wrote that damn letter,” he said. “But I want to tell the right man.”

  Bill Weigand was patient.

  “If you want to talk to the man immediately in charge of the case,” he said, “you talk to me. If you want to talk to the man in charge of Homicide, you can talk to Inspector O’Malley. Probably, if you insist, you can talk to the commissioner.” He smiled, a little wearily. “And whoever you talk to,” he said, “it will come back to me. But suit yourself.”

  “It’s … it’s nothing to talk about,” Gipson said. “Only … I suppose we’ve got to.”

  If it was about the letter, Weigand said, not hurrying it, it would be very desirable to talk to somebody, and the sooner the better.

  “If it hasn’t anything to do with your aunt’s death,” he said, “you will want to cooperate. Obviously. You don’t want us to spend time, and energy, digging into something which doesn’t mean anything … doesn’t mean anything to us, for our purposes.” He nodded to John Gipson, slowly. “And obviously you’re going to say it hasn’t anything to do with the murder.”

  Gipson looked at him thoughtfully.

  “I’d like to be in confidence,” he said. “Is that possible?”

  Weigand shook his head. He said that, obviously, he couldn’t promise. If, in spite of what Gipson argued, the police still thought the explanation of the letter had something to do with the case, it wouldn’t be confidential. He spoke slowly and carefully, saying what he had often said.

  “We don’t dig into things for the fun of it,” he said. “We don’t feed scandal to the newspapers. If you can convince me that whatever you are going to tell me—if you are going to tell me anything—is a private matter and has nothing to do with your aunt’s death, whatever you tell me stops with me. But I’ll be the one to decide. After I hear it.”

  Gipson was not satisfied. He did not look satisfied. Weigand waited, and the young man sitting beside his desk looked across the room at the wall; he seemed engrossed by a crack in the wall, along which the paint was broken. Weigand did not hurry him. John Gipson started to speak, he still was studying the crack in the wall.

  “It was about something that happened up in Maine this summer,” he said. “Late in July, I think. I wasn’t there. But when Amelia … when she threatened to tell Ken … Nora told me. The poor kid was … hell, she had to tell somebody.”

  He still looked at the crack in the wall.

  “She’s a good kid,” he said. “A damn good kid. And she’s crazy about Ken Frost. Has been for years. They knew each other as kids. He’s the only guy she ever remotely fell for. He’s … he’s all she knows. Even now, that’s true.”

  He looked at Weigand then. He said it was a hell of a thing to have to explain. He said he probably wasn’t making it clear.

  “Hell,” he said, “I’m fond of the kid. That’s why she … told me. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “You’re doing all right, Mr. Gipson.”

  Gipson shook his head. He said he didn’t think so. He said that, however he put it, Weigand was going to get a wrong idea of the kid.

  “There used to be words for it,” he said. “Words with … oh, definite meanings. I could just say she was a good kid. You know?”

  Wiegand said, again, that he got the picture. Still he did not hurry John Gipson.

  “A good kid and in love with Ken,” John Gipson repeated. “It’s … it’s embarrassing to talk about your sister.”

  He was rather likable, Weigand thought. But he did not say so. He did not even commit his own mind to the view.

  John Gipson looked again at the crack in the paint on the wall. He continued to look at it as he spoke.

  “Late in July, up in Maine, Nora met a man,” he said. “I don’t know much about him … just an ordinary sort of guy, I guess. I think he was in the Army and on leave … one of those thirty-day jobs, I guess. He was a couple of years older than Nora and … oh, just an ordinary sort of nice guy. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “I get the picture, Mr. Gipson.”

  “He didn’t mean a damn thing to Nora and I don’t suppose she meant much more to him,” John Gipson said, and his eyes still regarded the wall. He spoke slowly, picking his words.

  “Since Ken had been gone she’d gone around, of course,” he said. “I mean, she’d gone to lunch and things like that with men they both knew, or friends … or … well, just the usual run of guys you meet. Mostly in parties, of course. But if she met somebody on the street she knew and he invited her to lunc
h and she wasn’t tied up, she’d go to lunch. Like anybody.”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. His voice indicated that it was all right.

  “So when she met this guy in Maine, because he knew some people we knew and was an O.K. guy, she saw him now and then. As she would have if Ken had been here, as far as that goes. There wasn’t anything more than that, to begin with.” He paused again, and then turned suddenly to Bill Weigand. “There wasn’t anything more than that at any time,” he said, and he spoke emphatically. “That’s what I won’t be able to get across. It was just.…” He broke off and looked unhappy. After a moment of waiting, Bill made a suggestion.

  “Suppose you try to forget this is your sister you’re talking about, Mr. Gipson,” he said. “I think you’re running into … a taboo or something. Pretend this is just any nice girl you know, in love with her husband overseas, meeting a presentable young man in the summer on vacation, going swimming with him probably, having a drink or two with him. None of it having anything to do with her and her husband.”

  John Gipson listened and toward the end he nodded. He said he supposed Weigand was ahead of him; he said he supposed it was all obvious as hell.

  “Only,” he said, “it doesn’t seem obvious to Nora, and so it doesn’t to me. She isn’t just some … some nice girl you’ve met a couple of times and can call by name. She’s somebody I’m fond of. She’s somebody … different.”

  That, Bill told him, was natural. Things were obvious only when they happened to other people. They were not obvious to you, when you were in them, or when people close to you were in them. Old stories are old stories only in the abstract, Bill said.

  “Yes,” Gipson said. “That’s the way it is. It’s hard to explain. It would be easier if you knew Nora. She’s not.…” He broke off again and suddenly seemed angry.

  “You’ll think she’s a push-over, damn it all,” he said, “and she’s never been in love with anybody but Ken. Not in love … in any way. It was just something that happened, God knows how.”

  It wasn’t that hard to understand, Bill told him, when the difficulty of making himself clear stopped John Gipson again.