Hanged for a Sheep Page 15

  “But,” he said, “we have got it now. And maybe—” He broke off and stood staring thoughtfully at the bottle. Mullins came back while he was still staring and looked at the bottle and said, “Jeez!”

  “Perkins gave it to Pam,” Weigand told him. “Somebody tore her room apart looking for it. And one of the cats found it.”

  Mullins looked at the bottle incredulously.

  “You sure got to hand it to cats,” Mullins said. He looked at the bottle more carefully. “Pawed it open, though,” he said. “Got prints all over it.” He stared at Weigand. “Jeez,” he said. “Now we got cat prints.”

  “I opened it,” Jerry said. “The cats didn’t. And it won’t have my prints, except on the paper.”

  “Probably,” Weigand said, “it won’t have any prints. But—have the boys gone, Mullins?”

  The boys hadn’t, Mullins said. Weigand was pleased.

  “Have them work on it,” he said. “And if they find anything, check with what we’ve got.”

  Mullins took the bottle gingerly and went away with it.

  “What have you got?” Pam said. “Prints, I mean?”

  Everybody, Weigand told her. At least, they hoped everybody. From toilet articles, from glasses, from here, there and everywhere. In some instances the identity of the prints was only hypothetical; in others they could count on it. But it was optimistic to count on prints being where they meant anything.

  “Except,” he added, “that people forget. Or get hurried. Then you find prints. And juries love them. Do you know anything about knots, Jerry?”

  “Knots?” Jerry repeated. “What kind of knots? Tying knots? Or speed knots?”

  “Tying knots,” Weigand explained. “In this case, a hanging knot. A bowline.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “I wasn’t a boy scout. Or a sailor. Or—or what?”

  Weigand shrugged.

  “A rigger,” he said. “A cowboy for all I know. A yachtsman. Almost anybody.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “Who tied a bowline?”

  If he knew that, Weigand told him, he’d know a lot. The person who had hanged Harry Perkins.

  “You can say ‘man,’ I think,” Pam told him. “Because he must have been thrown over the bannisters, and that couldn’t be a woman. Or bowlines either, whatever they are. Women always tie grannies. At least Jerry says I always do.”

  “That I do know,” Jerry put in. “A square knot from a granny. Because I have to tie up the Christmas packages. And the things Pam sends people.”

  Bill Weigand stopped them. As far as throwing Harry Perkins over the bannisters was concerned—and Pam probably was right in thinking that necessary—it needn’t have been beyond the strength of a reasonably strong woman. Harry Perkins weighed hardly more than a hundred pounds. And he could have been propped up against the balustrade and slid over. He need not have been lifted and dropped. In either event, he would have fallen from the rail of the balustrade to the end of the leash about his neck, and that would have been drop enough.

  Pam shuddered and sat down suddenly and looked rather white.

  “It’s—terrible,” she said. “It’s always seemed—oh, more horrible than anything else, hanging. The second of falling and knowing and then—”

  Jerry sat on the arm of the chair and drew her to him.

  “Don’t think about it, Pam,” he said.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “And in this case he was out. He didn’t know what was happening.”

  He told them that Perkins had, apparently, first been knocked unconscious. Only then was the rope knotted about his neck and made fast to one of the balusters, and his body pushed over the rail. He admitted it still didn’t bear thinking of.

  “But,” Pam said. She leaned her head against Jerry’s shoulder for a moment and said, “All right, darling—I’m all right now” in a low voice—“but could a woman have knocked him out?”

  Weigand nodded, and said it was possible. Particularly if she used something as a weapon.

  “But to get back to the knot,” he said. “The bowline is a common enough knot—among people who know anything about knots. But most people only know square knots, and perhaps not even those by name. Or grannies. You don’t need a bowline to tie packages.”

  “What is it?” Pam asked. Weigand looked nonplussed.

  “I don’t know how to describe a knot,” he said. “It goes—well, you take an end, loop your line, lay the end across the standing part, loop the standing part around the end, bring the end around behind the standing part and through the little loop and—does that make it any clearer?”

  “No,” said Pam, decisively. “I don’t think anybody could tie a bowline, from what you say. Or even imagine a bowline.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jerry pointed out. “As long as you know what it is, and somebody tied it in the leash. You don’t have to explain it.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. But he still looked a little taken aback. “But it ought to be possible to explain it, you’d think. You take the end of a line and make a loop and then—”

  “Please, Bill,” Pam said. “Not again. After awhile we’ll get you a piece of rope or something and you can show us. But don’t explain it.”

  “Well—” Weigand began. But then Sergeant Mullins came back, and he looked excited. He said “Loot!” from the door and “We got a break!” as he advanced. He held the little green bottle loosely in a handkerchief.

  Weigand stood up and took a step toward Mullins and said, “Prints?”

  Mullins nodded, vigorously, holding out the bottle. They bent over it and Pam North was beside them, looking too. There were several clear impressions, outlined in black, on the bottle.

  “And?” Weigand said.

  “Craig’s,” Mullins told him. Mullins’s voice was happy. “Benjamin Craig’s. As neat a set as—”

  But Weigand, looking down at the bottle, seemed puzzled and not to share Mullins’s evident happiness.

  “And nobody else’s?” he said. His voice was sharp, demanding. Mullins looked less happy.

  “Nope,” he said. “Just Craig’s.” His voice was very worried. “That’s all right, ain’t it, Loot?” he enquired. His voice was very worried. Weigand looked at him and slowly shook his head.

  “That,” he said, “is not so good, Sergeant. I think somebody’s kidding us.”

  “But why—?” Pam began. Then she stopped and nodded too. Jerry got up and came over and looked at the bottle and looked perplexed. “Of course!” Pam said. “Where are the others?”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Where are the others?”

  “Because,” Pam explained, more to herself than to anybody, but a little to Jerry, “because there ought to be others. There’d almost have to be. Unless—”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “It ought to be a blur. Somebody packed the bottle and left prints, somebody unpacked it and put it on a shelf, somebody took it off a shelf—a dozen times it must have been handled.”

  “By people without fingers,” Pam said. “And that’s ridiculous. Or gloves?”

  “Why?” Weigand said. Nobody knew.

  “Obviously,” Jerry offered, “somebody wiped the bottle off.”

  Weigand was still staring at the bottle and after a moment he said, “Right.”

  “And after it was wiped off, Ben Craig picked it up,” Weigand said. “Which doesn’t make sense.”

  “Which doesn’t make one sense,” Pam corrected. “It doesn’t make the sense that it was Ben who poisoned Aunt Flora. But it makes sense, if somebody wanted it to look as if Ben poisoned Aunt Flora—somebody not very bright.”

  “Listen,” Mullins said, in a rather desperate voice. “We got prints, ain’t we? What do we want, huh?”

  “Sense, Sergeant,” Weigand told him. “As Pam says. Did they test the cork?”

  Mullins shook his head.

  “They say it ain’t no use, Loot,” he said. “Not that cork. They say a good cork, maybe, but where do you get good co
rks now days?” He looked at the lieutenant defensively. “That’s what they say, Loot,” he added. Weigand nodded again.

  “So what we get is too good to be true,” he said. “All very neat and easy and somebody is being very bright.”

  He looked, Pam thought, more than expectedly upset. This was not merely an annoyance; it was in some fashion a frustration.

  “This messes things up, doesn’t it, Bill?” she said. “I mean—you had it worked out, and this is all wrong.”

  It was something like that, Bill Weigand admitted. Jerry went back and sat down and felt the bump on his head. The three continued to look at the bottle as if it might explain itself at any moment. Jerry watched them.

  “If it doesn’t mean something,” he said, presently, “why did Perkins give it to Pam? Or did he merely think he had something when he didn’t have?”

  Pam came over and sat on the arm of Jerry’s chair and waited for Weigand to answer. Weigand walked to a table and stood with his fingers drumming on it, and then turned to them.

  That, he told them, was only part of it. Where did Perkins get the bottle? When? How long had he had it? Why had he hidden out and then returned? Did he know that there were prints of Ben Craig on the bottle and if he knew it, how did he know it?

  “Because,” Weigand put in, “you couldn’t see them unless they were brought up.”

  “Presumably,” Jerry suggested, “he got the bottle after it was used—after the contents were used—on Aunt Flora. The same day, probably, since the bottle was missing. It was missing that day, I gather?”

  “So do I,” Bill Weigand told him. “I couldn’t prove it in court, probably. It’s—it’s one of those tenuous things a lawyer can make confusing. But I gather the bottle appeared one night, was used the next morning, and disappeared some time that day. At any rate, it wasn’t there when Sand brought back the usual bottle of citrate salts. So presumably Harry Perkins took it. Then he kept it two weeks, being careful not to get prints on it, and gave it to Pam last night. And then got himself killed. And then somebody tears Pam’s room apart looking for the bottle.” He broke off and stared at them. “It looks almost,” he said, “as if somebody were determined we would find the bottle and pay attention to it. And that looks as if somebody wanted to lay the poisoning on Craig. So we get Craig, who is the only one to whom the bottle points, as the only one who wouldn’t want us to find it.”

  He sighed and crossed back to his chair and sat down. He looked up at Mullins.

  “Sit down, Sergeant,” he said. “And don’t look so damned hurt. It isn’t your fault.”

  Mullins said “O.K., Loot,” and sat down. He stared reproachfully at the bottle. Nobody said anything. Then Pam said, “What’s in it?”

  “Folwell’s Fruit Salts,” Mullins read. “What the hell’s that? And it says: ‘Professional Sample.’”

  “Some new kind of salts, apparently,” Weigand said, a little abstractedly. “Something just being introduced. And—” He stopped suddenly.

  “That fits, anyway,” Pam said. “Aunt Flora is always trying new things. She had to take something before breakfast every morning to wake up her stomach. That’s what she says it does, anyway. This is probably about the same thing she usually takes—citrate salts, fruit salts. Anything that fizzes, because—” Then Pam stopped, because Weigand was looking so intent that the other two were looking at him and not, she thought, listening to her. She stopped and looked at Weigand.

  “Professional sample,” Weigand said. His voice was speculative. “Which means—something the manufacturers send to physicians, hoping that the physicians will try it out on patients. I knew a dentist once who had a whole cupboard filled with samples of dentifrice. He never gave them away but—” He stopped again, and looked pleased. “And,” he pointed out, “we have a doctor in our midst. Dr. Wesley Buddie.”

  “Not in our midst,” Pam corrected. “Not tonight.”

  “Near enough,” Weigand told her. “Only—” He looked at his watch. The watch said ten minutes after two. Then he looked at the bottle. Mullins looked at it too, still a little resentfully.

  “Perhaps not tonight,” Weigand agreed. “Because it occurs to me that the bottle may really contain Mr. Folwell’s fruit salts. And nothing else. Which would be a note.”

  Mullins glared at the bottle, as if he were now willing to suspect it of anything. He stood up when Weigand spoke to him.

  “Send it down, Mullins,” Weigand told him. “Have the prints photographed and have them run a test on the contents. For arsenic, first, obviously. Tell them we want a report first thing in the morning, and we don’t have to know, to start with, how much arsenic. But tell them we’ll want that, of course, as soon as they can run a quantitative.”

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said, morosely. He carried the discredited bottle out again, still in the handkerchief. He left the Norths sitting in and on one chair, looking expectantly across at Weigand, alone in another.

  “What do they all say?” Pam asked, when Weigand remained thoughtful. “Or haven’t you asked them?”

  “They all say they were fast asleep in trundle beds,” Weigand told her. “No, I haven’t asked them. Except your Aunt Flora. But now—” He shrugged. “However,” he said, “they may as well have a chance to say it. All together. Come along.”

  He led them down to the drawing room and stepped ahead of them through the door. The major was pacing the floor in a dressing gown of appropriately military cut; the girls were sitting on a sofa and Bruce McClelland was standing near them, and nearest—Pam noted with interest—Judy Buddie. Chris Buddie sat by himself, reading. Ben Craig merely sat. Sand hovered. Weigand stopped inside the door and the Norths, entering around him, stood nearby. Weigand stared at the family, which stared back, except for Chris, who continued to read.

  “Well,” Weigand said, “one of you killed Harry Perkins. Right?”

  His tone was conversational. The major whirled and glared at him.

  “Nonsense!” the major said. “Damn foolishness!”

  Judy Buddie made a little sound that was half “no!” and half mere startled sound, and Bruce bent to put a hand on her shoulder and turned his head to look indignantly at Weigand. Chris put down his book and stood up and Clem Buddie leaned forward and stared at the detective. Sand hovered more nervously. Ben Craig looked at Weigand, with no apparent hostility, and did not move.

  “I had men outside,” Weigand told them. “They didn’t see anybody come in.” There was a sound of movement from Pam North and what looked like the beginning of speech. Then Pam said “ouch!” and looked at Jerry and said, “Oh!”

  “Also,” Weigand told them, “I had a man inside. But he thought it would be a fine thing to have a cup of coffee and a sandwich down in the kitchen. So all he knows was that nobody came up from the kitchen. So one of you had a clear field to kill Perkins.” He paused to let it sink in. Nobody said anything.

  “Now,” he said, and his voice had edge, “there’s no use asking whether any of you was up and about, because you’re all going to tell me you were sound asleep. Right?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “So we’ll leave that until tomorrow. And none of you heard anything. And you all loved Harry Perkins devotedly and wouldn’t have harmed a hair of his head. And none of you even knew he was in the house. Right?”

  Somebody did say something. It was, unexpectedly, Sand.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I knew he was in the house. I—I helped him hide. In the basement. He—he insisted on it, sir.”

  “Did he?” Weigand said. “And I suppose the police—” He stopped, apparently tired. “All right,” he said. “You hid him. We’ll go into that later, too, Sand. But I suppose it was natural. He said he was afraid, didn’t he?”

  “Something like that, sir,” Sand told him. “I—I thought he was, sir.”

  “He was,” Weigand said. “With cause. And he didn’t come to us because he knew, or thought
he knew, something which would incriminate a member of the family. He was very loyal.” He let that sink in. “He is now very dead,” he added. “Loyalty didn’t work both ways. If I were one of you, and not the murderer, I’d remember that. However—”

  They looked at him, restlessly, uneasily.

  “I want to find out only one thing, now,” he said. “Then I’ll let you go back to bed, if you want to. And this time I’ll have a man on each floor.”

  He looked at the major, and shook his head.

  “You would,” he said, cryptically. The major stared at him.

  “Would what, eh?” the major demanded.

  Weigand shook his head. He looked at the girls.

  “Your grandmother has a ranch in the West you’ve both been to summers,” he said. “Right? You rode” and that sort of thing. Right?”

  The girls looked puzzled, but Judy nodded.

  “So what?” Clem demanded, conceding it. She stood up, now. Weigand paid no attention to her.

  “You,” he said to Bruce. “Were you a Boy Scout? Or you?” the last was to Christopher Buddie. Bruce shrugged and nodded. Chris looked rather embarrassed.

  “In days of innocence,” he said. “When I was young and helpless.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. He looked at Craig and for a moment said nothing.

  “Did you go to the ranch too?” he asked. Craig leaned back and looked up at Weigand and shook his head.

  “Only once,” he said. “It was—strenuous. Why?”

  Weigand ignored the question.

  “Were you in the last war?” he asked, instead.

  “I don’t get it,” Craig told him. “But yes. I was in the Navy, for a while.”

  Weigand looked interested.

  “As a yeoman,” Craig went on, comfortably. “Yeoman’s mate, first class.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. He sounded dissatisfied. He looked around at them.

  “That’s all for tonight,” he said, curtly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned and left them. Pam and Jerry followed him into the hall.

  “There’ll be men around,” he told them. “Nothing more will happen tonight.”