Murder Is Served Read online

  The wind snatched at her breath and Peg did not try to say anything, even to ask where they were going. She merely went on, head down, with Carey beside her. She staggered once when a gust struck her, and then he put an arm around her waist, holding her close, so that they were a unit thrusting against the wind. It was better, after that.

  She did not know the street, beyond Eighth Avenue, into which they turned, and when they went into the door of what appeared to be an aged business building, she was thankful only that, inside, the air was still. It was no warmer, but it was still. They went up a flight of wooden stairs hugging one wall, and then up another flight. Then Carey knocked on a door, opening off a long corridor. He knocked and kept on knocking, and finally there were sounds of movement behind the door, and a man’s voice began to swear, sleepily. Then the door opened suddenly, and a slim man in his late twenties stood in it, hugging a blue robe around him.

  “Who the hell—” the man began, with anger, and then stopped. “So it’s you,” he said. “What the hell, Sergeant?”

  “Hiya, Colonel,” Carey said. “Wake you up?”

  “You know bloody, god—” the man at the door said and then, for the first time, seemed to see Peg Mott. “Well,” he said. “Well, well, Sergeant, What gives?”

  “Look, Paul,” Weldon Carey said. “We need a hand. How about it?”

  “Then why the hell don’t you come in?” the slender man said. “What are you waiting for?”

  They went in. It was warmer inside, but it was not warm. There was a single light in the middle of a room which seemed tremendous, which did, Peg began to realize, include the whole floor of the building. Toward the front there was only dimness, against which the light from the dangling bulb made no progress. The other way there were curtains stretching across, cutting off an end of the enormous room.

  “Come along back,” the man said. “Wait a minute.” He stopped. “Get some clothes on, Paula,” he shouted. “Got visitors.”

  The voice which came back was clear, high. There seemed to be laughter in it. But the words were merely, “Come along.”

  Carey seemed to hesitate a moment.

  “Told you I was getting married, didn’t I?” the slim man said. “Well, I got married. Come along.”

  They went back, the man Carey had called “colonel” holding the curtains apart for them. Warmth met them, faintly tinged with odors—the pungency of burning kerosene, of tobacco, of perfume. But most of all there was warmth.

  There was warmth and rather remarkable space. The room the curtains cut off was still a big room, high-ceilinged, with a row of tall, narrow windows at the far end. There were curtains over the windows; there was a screen cutting off one corner, near the windows; there were several deep sofas and a number of chairs; scattered through the room there was enough furniture, and rather good furniture, for a largish apartment.

  Peg Mott examined the room, unconsciously, because it was so surprising. She found that the “colonel” was looking at her, with faint amusement. But then he looked away and around the room and said, “Hey, Paula!”

  A small girl, very slender, with deep red hair, came out from behind the screen. She was holding a blue robe around her with one hand and carrying a tray in the other. There were cups on the tray, a silver coffee pot, and a tall bottle. She put the tray down on a low table and came toward them and said, as if she had known them a long time, “Hello.”

  “This is Paula, Sergeant,” the “colonel” said. “This is Weldon Carey, the guy I told you about. I don’t know who this is.” He motioned toward Peggy, and his whole face smiled.

  “All right, Paul,” Weldon Carey said. “This is Peggy Mott. Mrs. Tony Mott.”

  “Oh,” the red-haired girl said, involuntarily.

  “Yes, Mrs. Foster,” Carey said. The challenge came back into his voice. “Mrs. Tony Mott.”

  “Why not,” Paul Foster said. “Very handsome, too, Sergeant.”

  He crossed to Peggy Mott and held out his hand. His smile was warming; the room was warming. And then Paula Foster came across the distance between them, with both hands out.

  “Paul. Paula,” Weldon Carey said. “What gives?”

  Paul Foster turned, still smiling.

  “Why we got married,” he said. “Seemed too good to miss. Of course, she had all this fine furniture, too. That entered in.”

  “Only no place to put it,” Paula Foster said, “so we got this.”

  “Very fine, too,” Paul Foster said. “Homey. But plenty of room for expansion.”

  They were talking for time, Peggy thought; to give her time, themselves time. They kept at it. Obliquely, things were explained. Paul Foster had been a colonel—a lieutenant-colonel, at any rate—as surely as Weldon Carey had been a sergeant. “Air Force, naturally,” Weldon pointed out, and looked at the other man with affection. “Dropped down on us one day.” Foster had, literally, dropped down, bailing out of a fighter plane, coming to earth, hurt, near a group of Marines under Carey’s orders. Carey had crawled out and brought him in, Foster said; the Marines had taken care of him and finally got him back. “Heroes,” Foster said. “Particularly the sergeant here. And I was Army, remember. Must have been a temptation just to leave me there, you know.”

  The smile went all over his face again.

  There was warmth in the room; they were trying to make it her warmth. It wasn’t, couldn’t be, Peggy Mott thought. Tell them, Carey; they won’t want us after you tell them.

  Carey told them.

  “Hell of a note,” Paul Foster said. “The cops must be crazy. Now what do we do?”

  It was as easy as that; it was almost her warmth then, almost something she could share.

  “First,” Paula Foster said, “these kids get some coffee and cognac. Then they get some sleep.” She looked at her husband, looking a good ways up. “Otherwise they’ll catch cold,” she pointed out. “And anything’s better without a cold. No matter what it is.”

  They had coffee, with considerable cognac. Warmth came then, creeping—bodily warmth, a kind of drowsy acceptance. She was only half aware as the Fosters improvised, working together. She hardly realized, until morning, that she had slept beside the red-haired girl in a sofa turned into a bed, and that the two men—after long conversation which came to her dimly—had slept, less comfortably, on other sofas which did not turn into beds.

  The Sunday newspapers had cats in them. Jerry North moved, suddenly, halfway across the room and removed Gin from the book section of the Times. He returned, clutching the book section of the Times, and Sherry leaped from the couch, landed, somehow, under the amusement section of the Herald Tribune. The amusement section of the Herald Tribune began to travel, erratically, across the room. Jerry rescued that.

  Martini, who had been watching her offspring with pleased approval, took a dim view of their dispossession. She looked up at Jerry, lashed her tail, and said, “Yah!” The younger cats stopped and stared at her. Gin leaped, landing on her back, rolled her over. The two cats, locked, apparently, in a death struggle, rolled into the Times’ Review of the Week.

  “The long, lazy Sunday mornings before the fire,” Jerry said, to nobody. “The rest, the relaxation. No, Sherry!”

  Pam North appeared at the door of the kitchen and said that breakfast was almost ready. “I decided to make biscuits,” she said. “I thought biscuits would be nice for a change. And, anyway, Martha doesn’t seem to have got any bread. Are biscuits all right?”

  Jerry said that biscuits were fine.

  “Drop biscuits,” Pam said. “I think they’re better, don’t you?”

  “Fine,” Jerry said.

  Pam withdrew from the kitchen door, but she continued to talk.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “More mellow, somehow. Drop biscuits, that is. And not so formal, of course.”

  “What?” Jerry said.

  Pam came back to the kitchen door.

  “Drop biscuits,” she said. “What did you think?”

/>   “Fine,” Jerry said.

  “Better texture,” Pam said. “And, I’ll have to admit, easier. I don’t deny that.”

  “No,” Jerry said.

  There was a little pause then, and Jerry was conscious that he was being looked at, waited for. He looked up.

  “To be perfectly honest, I put too much milk in,” Pam said, when he was looking at her. “And they have to be drop biscuits, or reconstituted. And then I’d probably have to measure. All right?”

  “Fine,” Jerry said. He grinned at her, suddenly.

  “Damn,” Pam North said. “You knew all the time I’d put too much milk in. Didn’t you?”

  Jerry nodded, still grinning.

  “I never get away with anything,” Pam said. “Boiled eggs? There’s the telephone.”

  The last was a formality. The telephone was ringing almost in Jerry North’s lap.

  “Who’d be calling at this hour Sunday morning?” Pam said, with interest. Jerry said, “Hello? Yes?”

  “Before breakfast,” Pam said, and Jerry, distracted by two points of view, compromised and said, “What?”

  “Never mind,” Pam said, and the man at the other end of a telephone wire said, “Paul Foster. You don’t know me, Mr. North.”

  Jerry said, “Ummm?”

  “About the Mott case,” Paul Foster said. He had a light, oddly gay, voice.

  Jerry said, “Ummm?”

  “Who is it?” Pam said. “I just put the biscuits in. But they’re almost done.”

  Jerry shook his head at her. He jerked it toward the front of the apartment, indicating the extension telephone in the study.

  “All right,” Pam said, “but remember there isn’t any bread.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jerry said into the telephone. “Something was going on. Will you say that again?”

  “We want to engage you,” Paul Foster said. “Retain you. Whatever the word is.”

  “Retain me?” Jerry said.

  “You and Mrs. North,” Foster said. “To find out what’s at the bottom of it. Because Peggy didn’t do it, you know.”

  “What on earth?” Jerry said. And then a new voice came in, strong in Jerry’s ear. It was Pam’s voice and it said, “He means he wants to hire us, Jerry. Don’t you, Mr.—ah—?”

  “Foster,” the man said. “Mrs. North. Good. Hire you is better. To find out who killed Mott.”

  “Look,” Jerry said, brushing off a cat which was resenting his withdrawal from the world of cats. “Look, we’re not detectives. Where did you ever get that idea?”

  “Officially,” Pam said. “Which means for money,” she explained. “Although sometimes I wonder—” The last seemed to be to herself.

  Paul Foster said, “Oh.” He seemed surprised and a little confused.

  “Anyway,” Pam said, “how do you know she didn’t?”

  “I’ve talked to her,” Paul Foster said. “She says she didn’t.”

  “For God’s sake!” Jerry said. “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “And,” Pam said, “where is she? Does she know the police are looking for her? And why did you call us, anyway?”

  Paul Foster hesitated, momentarily.

  “If I told you where she is, you’d tell the police?” he asked, then. Jerry came in; he was a little explosive; he said, “Damn right we would.”

  “Then, obviously—” Foster said. “Yes, Mrs. North, she knows the police want to talk to her.”

  “Then it’s very simple,” Mrs. North pointed out. “She ought to go to Bill Weigand—he’s a detective lieutenant, you know—and let them talk to her. Why not, if she didn’t do it?”

  There was a longer pause, this time. Then Paul Foster, with an odd hesitancy in his voice, said it was not as simple as that. “There’s more than’s in the papers,” he said. “It’s—I’m afraid it’s got loused up a bit. That’s why we thought of you. Car—” He stopped abruptly. “A friend of hers telephoned a man named Leonard this morning, to ask him about something and—”

  “What she said, really said, in that paper,” Pam North said. “We know about that, Mr. Foster. A man named Weldon Carey called Professor Leonard. Go on.”

  “Leonard said he wouldn’t talk. He said he’d told you all he knew, anyway. He said you—well, knew this Weigand. But that if you didn’t agree with the police you’d, that is—”

  “Listen,” Jerry said, “if we know where Mrs. Mott is, we’ll tell the police. You can count on that. I hope you haven’t got any other idea, Mr. Foster.” Jerry’s voice was not friendly.

  “If we thought Mrs. Mott didn’t do it, we’d tell Bill that,” Pam North said. “We might even try to persuade him. That’s all.” She paused briefly, but seemed to be holding the line open by an effort of will. They waited. “I still don’t see where you come into this, Mr. Foster,” she said. There was curiosity in her voice. Jerry heard it; identified it; unconsciously sighed.

  “Pam—” he began. But he seemed to have, somehow, lost control of the conversation.

  “Can’t I come around to your place and explain?” Foster said. “That’s all we—I—want. Just to have you listen and, if you want to, give us advice.”

  “I can do that now,” Jerry said. “Go—” He stopped, realizing that he was not being listened to.

  “All right,” Pam said. “I don’t see why not. When?”

  “Now,” Foster said, and his voice was, again, oddly gay.

  “Pam,” Jerry said. “We haven’t—”

  “Say in half an hour,” Pam told Mr. Foster. “That’ll give us time to have breakfast. All right, Jerry?”

  “I guess—” Jerry began. His voice was unhappy.

  “Good,” Pam said. “In half an hour. Oh—the biscuits! Good-bye.”

  She hung up and so, apparently, did Mr. Foster. Jerry North took the telephone down from his ear, shook his head at it, and put it in its cradle. Pam came out of the front room, very rapidly. She did not pause, avoided a cat with what was half a dance step, and went on to the kitchen. Jerry heard the oven door open; heard Pam North say, “Oh!” Then she came to the kitchen door, shaking her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we can eat a little of the insides. Of course, I could make pancakes, I suppose. Only with Mr. Foster coming so soon—?” She ended, her voice enquiring. They ate the insides of the biscuits, and bacon and boiled eggs. The cats, shouldering one another only slightly, finished the egg remaining in the cups. Pam watched them, considering. “After all,” she said, “I guess they’re as sanitary as we are, really. Unless you don’t like cats.”

  Paul Foster came. He was slim, a little above medium height; he had a smile which lighted up his face. And a red-haired girl, hatless, seemingly wrapped around and around in a heavy cloth coat, came with him. “Paula,” Paul Foster said, and the smile absorbed his face. “We know it’s funny. But we decided to get married anyway.”

  Paula Foster, unwrapped, was very small. She was also very appealing. She looked at Pam quickly, and seemed pleased with what she saw. She looked at Jerry North. They both looked at Jerry North. Paul Foster looked around the room.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “We’ve barged in. We’re trying to drag you in. If you really want us to, we’ll clear out.”

  He waited. Pam North waited, looking at her husband.

  “No,” Jerry said. “We’ll listen, Mr. Foster. Now that you are here.”

  The Norths listened. They heard all of it. Jerry shook his head.

  “Carey was a damn fool,” he said. “You realize that?”

  “He was,” Foster said. “In some respects he is. But—he’s a hell of a guy. Maybe he’s a little bit mixed up, still. A lot of us are, you know. But he’s a hell of a guy.”

  The police, Jerry pointed out, would not think so. Foster smiled and agreed with that.

  “And eventually,” Jerry said, “the police will catch up with them. You realize that, Foster? And that they’re doing themselves no good?”

  Foster agreed w
ith that, in principle. He did not smile.

  “But the damage is done, for the moment,” he said. “And—something may turn up. Carey was a fool; nothing drastic was going to happen to the girl in jail. I realize that. But nothing drastic’s going to happen, now, if she stays out of it for a day or two. Until she gets a lawyer, anyway. Then, of course, she’ll have to surrender. The lawyer will make her. Say—tomorrow.”

  “I warn you,” Jerry North said, “if I find out where she is, I’ll turn her in. I ought to turn you in, now, you know. You’re aiding and abetting, or whatever it is.”

  “By force?” Foster said, and his smile went over his face. “You don’t know where we live, you know. If you call your policeman friend, you’re going to force us to wait for him?”

  “Stalemate,” Pam North said. “Deadlock.”

  Jerry shook his head. He said it wasn’t. He said they could give names to the police, descriptions. Paul Foster nodded to that.

  “And they’ll find us,” he said. “I don’t doubt that. By tomorrow, perhaps. But we only want until tomorrow. What do you gain?”

  “Jerry,” Pam said, “doesn’t it make sense?”

  Jerry North thought it didn’t. He shook his head. He said, “Well, all right. What do you want us to do?”

  “See the girl,” Paul Foster said. “Listen to her.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “Not unless she’ll promise to give herself up.”