The Dishonest Murderer Page 13

  The conviction was so absolute that she did not further analyze it; did not tell herself, as she might have, that hundreds of women in New York used that scent, that any one of them might, after an embrace, have left this revealing fragrance on Howard Phipps’s clothes. She thought: It was Breese Burnley. She must have been with him when I called. But—why didn’t he have her join us? That would have been the ordinary thing to do. There was nothing between them, had never been anything between them, which would make him hesitate to say that Breese was with him, nothing in the fact to prove embarrassing to anyone. Yet—

  “Anything I can do,” Howard Phipps said, answering her unfinished request. He shook his head. “It’s an awful thing,” he said. “A horrible, unnecessary thing.” For a moment he seemed lost in the thought of Bruce Kirkhill’s death. He returned. “What is it, Freddie?” he said. “What can I do?”

  But now she did not say what she had planned, tell him what had happened, ask his help. Now Howard Phipps was someone else; now he had become, for the first time since she had known him, a person existing in his own right, complicated in himself. Before, she thought, he was merely a kind of projection of Bruce.

  She made herself smile; she made the smile deprecating, a little embarrassed.

  “I’m silly,” she said. “I—I just had to talk to somebody. Somebody who knew Bruce.” She paused. “Howard,” she said, “what’s it all about? Don’t you know—anything? It’s so—so mixed up. So strange.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ve been trying to think. Why was he there? That’s the strangest thing. I—”

  “Was he meeting someone?” she said. “It—it doesn’t matter now, Howdie. Was there some other—somebody else? Somebody he was meeting?”

  “Down there?” he said, and his voice was surprised. “Some woman, you mean? But why, Freddie? It wouldn’t make sense.” He drank. “Anyway,” he said, “there wasn’t anyone else. You know that sort of thing about other men.” He smiled faintly. “Usually,” he said, “they tell you. One way or another.”

  “There used to be Breese Burnley,” Freddie said. “I know that. But it was a long time ago. Wasn’t it?”

  He looked at her quickly; apparently he saw nothing in her face.

  “There was never anything that mattered,” he said. “What there was was years ago.” His voice was casual; the casualness, she thought, was studied.

  “Breese is lovely, of course,” she said. “Don’t you think so?” Now she was very casual; she spoke as if abstractedly, as if she were hardly aware of what she was saying. He looked at her again. Her expression was abstracted.

  “Sure,” he said. “Very lovely.” His tone, in turn, displayed lack of interest. He was filling with words a gap in thought. “About this other,” he said. “I’ve been trying to think of something. Some explanation.” He seemed to be thinking as he spoke. “There’s only one thing,” he said, and turned toward her. “You knew about his brother? George?”

  She shook her head.

  “I knew he had a brother,” she said. “A year or two older, wasn’t he? But I thought he was dead.”

  Now Howard Phipps shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Unfortunately. So far as I know, so far as the chief knew, I think, George is alive all right. Alive and probably in trouble. Probably making trouble. He always did, from what the chief used to let drop. Always in jams.” He narrowed his eyes slightly, as if he were concentrating. “His being there may have had something to do with George,” he said. “I’m just guessing but—”

  He ordered them more drinks. He went ahead.

  Bruce’s older brother, he said, had always been a good deal of a problem. Phipps didn’t know the details, only the general picture. Inheriting jointly with Bruce at their father’s death, he had used up his money fast. He had drunk it up, gambled it up, played it up. When it was gone, he had turned to Bruce for help, and had got it. “Got a lot of it, I imagine,” Phipps said. But help had never put George Kirkhill on his feet. It had never kept him out of trouble—financial trouble, once or twice (Phipps said he guessed, rather than knew) trouble with the law, a good deal of trouble with women. “A no-good,” Phipps said. “All around, no good.”

  In recent years, Phipps thought, George Kirkhill had been in the east, still going downhill.

  “For the past couple of years,” Phipps said, “I don’t think the chief knew where George was, or what he was up to. I guess the chief didn’t much want to know; that he figured there wasn’t anything he could do for him. Then about a week, ten days ago—well, here I’m guessing.”

  A week or ten days ago, Phipps said, Bruce Kirkhill had received a letter marked: “Personal. Confidential.” Normally, Phipps opened such letters, assuming the inscription to be a device. But this one he had not opened. “Looked as if it might be personal and confidential,” he said. “Hand addressed, no return address, postmarked New York.” He had passed it, unopened, to Senator Kirkhill. He had been in the office when Kirkhill opened it and read it.

  “Whatever it was, it made the chief sore,” Phipps said. “Upset him. He read it, went back and read part of it again and then he said, ‘Damn George!’ He sounded pretty sore. Then he tore the letter up and threw the scraps in the wastebasket, and after a bit we went on with the stuff we had to do. But he was upset the rest of the day.”

  She waited.

  Phipps shook his head. He said that was all he knew. He said if he went on from there, he’d be guessing.

  He went on from there.

  “But,” he said, “this brother of his may have ended up on the Bowery. It would have been like him. Maybe he wrote the letter, asking the chief to meet him. Maybe there was some reason the chief thought he had to meet him. Maybe George had got mixed up with crooks of some sort, and maybe somehow he had given them a hold on the chief. Maybe the chief went down to—well, to bail his brother out of something. Maybe the chief didn’t like the setup and got tough and—” He finished with a shrug. “I don’t know any of this is true,” he said. “I’m guessing. But I do think he heard from his brother, or about his brother. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

  Phipps finished his drink. He said, again, that this was all he could think of.

  “All you can say for it,” he said, “is that it’s possible. It’s—well, I guess it’s just better than nothing; than no explanation at all.”

  Freddie sat looking at her almost full glass. If it could only be this, only something this simple, this far from all of them! If all of it could only be pushed away, like this; laid on someone anonymous, faceless, a brother of whom none of them had ever heard. The air would be breathable again; her mind clear again. Then it would be simple—a sense of loss, only; grief only. Not this anxiety, this turmoil of inchoate fear, this dark uneasiness. She found she was grasping at the proffered explanation, trying to stretch it, make it cover everything. But how did it cover the man with his teeth bared in death?

  “Have you told the police this—this theory?” she said, finally. “Given them this to work on?”

  Thrown them this—distraction, she thought? Tried this legerdemain?

  Phipps shook his head. He said he supposed he should. He pointed out how small the factual basis was, how spreading the theory built on it.

  “But it’s something,” she said. “Anything is better than nothing. If they knew why Bruce went there—” She broke off. If they knew that it would be enough? She thought: Nothing but all of it will be enough; they won’t stop until they have all of it. She wanted to explain that to Howard Phipps, as she had first planned to do; to tell him all of it, about her father, about the man named Smiley, to have him share the problem with her. It was ridiculous, it was meaningless, that she now could not, merely because a man who was nothing to her had, by an inadvertent revelation of emotions she had not expected, or thought about, become a person to be considered as—as what? An individual complexity. No longer, as she had thought of him before, a mind functioning efficiently and
abstractly, but a mind like her own, involved. Involved, in short, in all of this, because in part of this his emotions apparently were involved.

  “We must tell them,” she said. “Tell this Weigand, this lieutenant. Or Sergeant Blake.” She was surprised that she thought of Blake. “It’s William Blake,” she said, and was vaguely surprised to hear the words, to realize that she thought of him as William Blake.

  “Funny name for a cop,” Phipps said. “All right. Probably I ought to tell them about it, for what it’s worth.”

  Harry Briggs had spoken concisely. You felt that he planned his sentences in advance, was sure before he spoke not only of the content, but of the form of what he was about to say. His recital had been bare, uninflected.

  “About two weeks ago,” he had said, “Admiral Satterbee came to the office. It was the eighteenth of last month, of December. He said he had seen an advertisement we run in the Times. He wanted to employ us. He wanted us to check up on something he had heard about Senator Bruce Kirkhill.”

  He looked at the admiral, then. The admiral nodded.

  “From information which had come to him,” Briggs said, his words precise, his tone precise, his face square and without expression, “the admiral believed that Senator Kirkhill was accepting bribes to alter his position on the Valley Authority. He wanted to verify this fact.”

  “Did you ask him why?” Bill Weigand said.

  “No sir,” Briggs said. “I did not feel that that concerned us.”

  “But you felt competent to conduct this investigation?” Weigand asked him.

  “We accepted—I accepted—his retainer,” Briggs said. “Five hundred dollars. If I had not—”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Go ahead.”

  “I personally was concerned with another investigation,” Briggs said. “My partner was not in the office at first, although he came in before the admiral left. After the admiral had gone, I conferred with Mr. Smiley and we decided that he would handle it. I believe he continued the investigation until—until today.”

  “You believe?” Weigand said.

  “To the best of my knowledge,” Briggs said. “Mr. Smiley was a member of the firm. He did not, as an employed operative would have, make regular reports. He was entirely in charge of the enquiry.”

  “In other words,” Weigand said, “you stepped out of it. You washed your hands of it. Right?”

  Briggs looked at the lieutenant for a moment.

  “It was Mr. Smiley’s investigation,” he said, after that moment. “My own time was occupied with another matter.”

  He was told to go ahead.

  “I presumed,” Briggs said, “that Mr. Smiley reported at intervals to Admiral Satterbee.”

  He looked at the admiral.

  “Telephoned two or three times,” the admiral said. “Never was specific. Just said he wanted to report progress. But didn’t say what the progress was.”

  Bill Weigand’s face betrayed no satisfaction with this, but he did not press Admiral Satterbee. He turned back to Briggs.

  “You’re saying you knew nothing about it?” he asked.

  Briggs shook his head, then.

  “I did not say that, precisely,” he pointed out. “Mr. Smiley spoke to me about it, of course. When Admiral Satterbee telephoned yesterday evening to terminate the investigation, I was able to tell him that our investigation appeared likely to substantiate the allegations against—”

  “You said, ‘seems like there’s maybe something to it,’” the admiral cut in. “Something like that.”

  “I may have,” Briggs said.

  “You based that on something?” Weigand asked. “Something you’d got from Smiley?”

  Briggs hesitated.

  “Or were you just stringing a client along?” Weigand asked him.

  “Certainly not, Lieutenant,” Briggs said. “You are aware that our agency—”

  “Skip it,” Bill Weigand said. His voice sounded weary. “What did you base it on?”

  “Mr. Smiley was satisfied with his progress,” Briggs said. “He had indicated as much.”

  Weigand looked at him and waited.

  “Very well,” Briggs said. “Mr. Smiley had come to believe that the senator’s secretary, Mr. Phipps, was making contact with the Julian Grainger office. Mr. Grainger is director of—”

  “I know,” Weigand said.

  “I put two and two together,” Briggs said. “That is all. If Mr. Smiley had more specific information, he did not disclose it to me.”

  “And that is all you know?” Weigand asked.

  “Except that Mr. Smiley was shot and killed this afternoon, yes,” Briggs said.

  Bill Weigand looked at the admiral. “Well?” he said.

  “Perfectly true, far as it goes,” Admiral Satterbee said. “That is, you say this man Smiley was killed. Don’t know about that.”

  “Then,” Bill Weigand said, “what did Smiley want to see you about?”

  Admiral Satterbee looked at Jerry North, at Pam North. They nodded together.

  “Well,” the admiral said, “it began with this letter. Anonymous letter, typewritten. Then—”

  The admiral told Weigand what he had told the Norths, ending with Smiley’s visit.

  “Wanted to get money from me,” the admiral said. “Realize I should have filled you in at once. But—”

  “But you didn’t,” Weigand said. “Did you plan to pay him?”

  “Don’t know,” Admiral Satterbee said. “Thinking it over. Don’t think I would have.”

  “But you would have seen him again?”

  “Probably.”

  “Admiral, did you see him again? This afternoon. Say at about a quarter of three? Did you—”

  “No!” the admiral stood up. “You have no authority—”

  “I have,” Weigand said. “You deny seeing him this afternoon?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You were here, in the apartment?”

  “Yes, I—No. Matter of fact, went for a walk. About half an hour. Left some time around two-thirty, quarter of three. Gone three-quarters of an hour.”

  “Walking?”

  “Walk every day.”

  “In snow? And slush?”

  “Well,” the admiral said, “doesn’t snow every day, you know. Eh? If it snows, yes. In the Navy learn—”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “You went for a walk. You had no communication with Smiley after you talked to him last night, or early this morning? You never found out how much he wanted to—keep you out of this?”

  “I didn’t talk to Smiley again,” the admiral said.

  “And you called off the investigation merely because you had changed your mind? Thought you were meddling, decided against it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bill,” Pam said. “Can I ask Mr. Briggs something?”

  “In a moment, Pam,” Bill said. “Sergeant.”

  Sergeant Mullins came farther into the room. He said, “O.K., Loot?”

  “Get in touch with Mr. Grainger,” Bill said. “The son—what’s his name—Curtis. And ask him to come over here.”

  “Ask him?” Mullins said.

  Bill Weigand smiled faintly.

  “Urge him, Mullins,” he said. “Urge him.”

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He looked at the Norths. Slowly he shook his head.

  “All right, Pam,” Bill said. “Go ahead.”

  “Only,” Pam said, “was Mr. Smiley following?” She looked at Briggs. “Tailing?” she said. “Would that be a way of doing it?”

  Briggs looked at her. He blinked momentarily.

  “The senator,” Pam said. “Would Mr. Smiley follow him around? Last night, say? Because, if he did, he might—might have found out something.”

  Briggs considered this. He spoke slowly. He said, “Possibly.”

  “That,” Pam North said, “seems to me much more likely than the admiral. That’s what I mean.”

  She looked around at the men. �
��Of course,” she said, “I realize it’s perfectly obvious. Still, nobody asked it. I mean—”

  Bill Weigand nodded slowly.

  “Suppose,” Pam North said, “Mr. Smiley was waiting for the senator when he got off the train. And followed him and saw him—saw this landlord give him the knockout drops. Or—”

  “This what?” Jerry North said. Then he said, “Oh!” “She reads the Times,” he told the others. “Landlord is just a figure of speech.”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Or communist. Or whatever it was. Then, of course, Mr. Smiley decided to blackmail whoever it was, the way he did the admiral and—oh!” She looked at the admiral. Weigand looked at the admiral. Weigand said, “Well, Admiral Satterbee?”

  “Told you,” the admiral said. His voice was resolute, possibly the resolution was a little exaggerated. “Didn’t make any such—such idiotic claim. Would have kicked him out.”

  “I mean,” Pam said, “if we consider the admiral a side-issue.” Admiral Satterbee looked at her. He seemed, Jerry thought, faintly puzzled, even resentful. “Two birds with one stone,” Pam said. “Both ends against the middle. Sauce for the goose—” She paused and said, “Goodness!”

  “Anchor to windward,” Admiral Satterbee said, unexpectedly. Everybody looked at him. Then Bill Weigand looked at Pam North. He narrowed his eyes a little; his expression was quizzical.

  “Two strings to his bow,” Pam said. “The real murderer, because he saw him. The admiral, because he thought he might turn a pretty penny.” She shook her head. “The trouble is,” she said, in a different tone, “once you start them you can’t stop.”

  “Pam!” Jerry North said. “Listen, Pam.”

  “Anyway,” Pam said, after a moment of appearing ready to listen, “the real murderer killed him. Mr. Smiley, I mean. Mr. Smiley called him up, or something, and arranged to meet him and—you said in his office, Bill?”