Murder within Murder Read online

  He paused, seeking words.

  “Otherwise peculiar,” Pam North said. “I know. And Mr. Hill certainly isn’t that.”

  Bill nodded. And as for the writer’s assurance that the case would not be solved, there was a school of writers which held that the police never solved anything. Which, he added mildly, was untrue. They solved most things. Private detectives got divorce evidence. They got back stolen jewelry by making dickers the police couldn’t make. They investigated applicants for surety bonds. It was, he said, a matter of machinery.

  “For example,” he said, “fifty or more men, all of them trained, some of them fairly bright, have been working on this case. Part of the time; all of the time. They’ve been interviewing practically everyone who was in the library when she collapsed there. They’ve gone over the apartment house she lived in. They’ve taken hundreds of fingerprints and run them through the files, looking for somebody we know. They’ve been checking into the lives of everyone concerned. Out in California, they’ve been checking up on the Burts, because Mrs. Burt wrote a letter to Miss Gipson. They’ve checked up on the handwriting in the letter, just to make sure she did write it. They’ve checked—are still checking—on Major Frost, to see if he was really in Kansas City instead of New York yesterday afternoon. The precinct men have just about taken apart the hotel in which Florence Adams was killed—and incidentally, we’ve picked up a couple of men we’ve been anxious to meet for quite some time. They’ve interviewed people who work and live within earshot of the hotel, trying to find somebody who did hear a shot and knows what time he heard it, because if we come to a trial we’ll want to pin that down if we can. At the laboratory over in Brooklyn they’ve put the slug that killed the girl through all the tests there are, and if we find the .25 caliber German automatic it came from we’ll greet it like a brother. Precinct men have been trying to find out where John Gipson had lunch today and if anybody can swear he did, and whether the Frosts had lunch at Twenty-one and when. Out in Indiana, men are checking up on Philip Spencer and trying to find out why, exactly, he lost his job—and who the student was he was supposed to have made passes at. Up in Maine—”

  “Look,” Jerry said mildly, “who are you arguing with, Bill? Your drink’s getting warm.”

  Bill Weigand broke off, looked at Jerry a moment without apparently seeing him, looked at his drink and finished it. They looked at the menus, then, and ordered.

  “I don’t know what got me started on that,” Bill said, when Fritz had gone off to get them food. “Only people somehow get the idea that chasing criminals is a one-man job—just because newspapermen and everybody else find it easier to write about it that way. It’s—it’s a mass movement.”

  “Why Maine?” Pam said.

  They all looked at her.

  “What are they looking for in Maine?” she said. “You said ‘up in Maine’ and then Jerry interrupted you.”

  Oh yes, Bill said, that. He said that John Gipson had explained his sister’s letter and that his explanation could stand checking in Maine. He stopped.

  “Well?” Pam said.

  “Period,” Bill said. “Confidential, unless it means something. By agreement with young Gipson.”

  Pam said, “Oh.” She said, “All right.”

  “Of course,” she said, “I suppose Amelia had found out something about her niece and was going to tell her niece’s husband. Something about a man. Apparently a man in Maine.”

  “What makes you think that?” Bill said. His voice was, he thought, noncommittal.

  Pam said that was the way the letter sounded.

  “And,” she said, “you’re transparent, Bill. Actually, I just threw it out. You should have heard yourself keep expression out of your voice.”

  Bill Weigand said, “Oh.”

  Fritz came back with the food. They ate, making small remarks between bites, chiefly to prove that they were too civilized to obey the human instinct to put first things first. Pam finished and lighted a cigarette.

  “About Mr. Hill,” she said, “I really still like Mrs. Burt better. What have you found out about her, or is that confidential, too?”

  Bill Weigand reached across and took a cigarette out of Pam’s pack. He said it wasn’t confidential. He told them what they had found out about Mrs. Burt, her recent history, her marriage. And he pulled the photograph out of his pocket and gave it to Pam. She looked at it, and then she looked at Bill and raised her eyebrows. Jerry North took the photograph from her and looked at it, and then he, too, looked at Bill.

  “Well,” Pam said, “who is it?”

  “Is it anybody you ever saw?” Bill asked her. She took the photograph back from Jerry and looked at it again.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Is it?”

  “If your theory about Helen Burt is true, it’s a picture of her seventeen years ago, when she was Helen Merton,” he said. “Is it?”

  Pam looked at the photograph carefully. She said clothes were funny, even seventeen years ago. She put the photograph down in front of her and looked off into space. Then she looked back at Bill.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know either,” Bill said. “There’s no apparent reason—like a long nose, or a harelip or anything—why it couldn’t be. I’d even say there was a general similarity.”

  Pam nodded. She said she would, too.

  “The age is the trouble, partly,” she said. “People change so, unless you know them very well. In pictures, particularly.”

  “Huh?” Mullins said, emerging suddenly from his food.

  “Hello, Sergeant,” Pam said. “Enjoy yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Mullins said. “What do you mean people change if you don’t know them, Mrs. North?”

  “Only,” she said, “if you know very well what people look like now, you can pick them out then. But you have to.”

  “Oh,” Mullins said. He thought it over. “Sure,” he said. He looked at Bill Weigand.

  “Obviously,” Bill told him, gravely. “Very clearly put.”

  “Oh,” Mullins said. He looked at his plate, which looked back at him blankly.

  “Have you got a picture of her now?” Pam asked.

  Bill Weigand shook his head. He said they didn’t have yet. He said they could get one; he said they probably would.

  “You think it’s a digression, don’t you?” Pam said. Bill nodded.

  “Who do you think?” she said.

  Bill Weigand lifted his shoulders.

  “No hunch,” he said. “For your use only, Pam. Not to be quoted. The odds are on one of the kids. I’d say on Gipson. He wanted money. If his aunt died he’d have money. That’s where the odds always are.”

  “Or his sister,” Jerry said. “If she had a good enough motive—this mysterious motive.”

  “That isn’t mysterious,” Pam said. “It’s merely confidential. Is she in love with her husband, Bill?”

  “Am I Dorothy Dix?” Bill said. Pam merely waited. “For a guess—yes,” he said. “For a guess, he’s in love with her.”

  “And the man in Maine?” Pam said.

  “What man in Maine?” Bill wanted to know.

  “By all means,” Pam said. “Be confidential. I take it you won’t buy Mr. Hill?”

  “No,” Bill Weigand said.

  “Or this former professor—Spencer?” That was from Jerry.

  Bill said he had told them he didn’t have a hunch. He said Spencer was obviously in the running. He had merely given them the odds.

  “Not counting Mr. Hill,” Pam said, “we have how many? The nephew and niece. That’s two. Mr. Spencer, that’s three. Will you count Mrs. Burt?”

  Certainly he would count Mrs. Burt, Bill Weigand told her.

  “Because she could be Helen Merton, or just because she wrote the letter?” Pam said.

  Because she wrote the letter, Weigand told her. When you boiled it down, there was no reason whatever to think she was Helen Merton.r />
  “Or any of the things you think,” he added. “That it was really she who killed her family, and that Amelia Gipson knew her before and identified her, and found something which had been missed earlier to throw suspicion on her. It’s pure—hypothesis.”

  But, Pam reminded him, he had gone to the trouble to get the photograph. Bill said it was very little trouble; he said he wouldn’t deny his curiosity had been aroused.

  “Can I keep the picture?” Pam said. “Maybe something’ll come to me.”

  Bill nodded. He said he was sure something would come to her.

  “It always does,” Jerry said. “Something.”

  “You two,” Pam said. “Are you coming to look at the cat, Bill?”

  “I’m going home to look at a bed,” he said.

  “How’s Dorian?” Pam asked him.

  Bill said that Dorian was fine—and out of town.

  “I’m going home to sleep,” he said. Pam said, “Oh.”

  The Norths walked home slowly, not talking much. Pam said she thought Bill was stuck, and Jerry said that he would probably come unstuck, since he usually did. In the apartment, the kitten talked to them sternly, but forgot to be aggrieved when they sat down and it could climb to Jerry’s shoulder and, from there, bite his ear.

  “She likes your flavor,” Pam said, watching them. “That’s good.”

  Jerry took the little cat from his shoulder and put it on Pam’s, which was conveniently within reach. The little cat bit Pam’s ear.

  “And yours,” Jerry said contentedly, as Pam said, “Ouch!” “For that matter—”

  “I think,” Pam said, “that it’s bedtime for small cats. Come on, Martini. I’ve given her the guest-room,” she said. “I think she ought to have a room of her own.”

  She put the little cat in the guest-room and came back and sat down beside Jerry. When she leaned back, her head rested on his shoulder. She leaned back.

  Jerry North looked at the headlines in The Times and then at the book page. Orville Prescott had reviewed the wrong book. But the advertisement had a good spot. Jerry put the paper down, poured himself another cup of coffee and looked at Pam. She was studying the photograph. He continued to look at her, with approval, and she looked up.

  “Well,” he said, “have you made up your mind?”

  Pam shook her head.

  “I’ll have to go look at her,” she said. “Or wait until Bill gets a photograph of her now.”

  Jerry advised the latter. He said it might be a little complicated to go to Mrs. Burt and say you wanted to look at her because she might be a murderer.

  “Oh,” Pam said, “I’d have to have an excuse, of course. I left my vanity. I mean my compact.”

  “Did you?” Jerry said. “The silver one?”

  “No,” Pam said. “The one I got because I left the silver one somewhere else. Only then I found it again. I’m very careful with it now. This was the other one.”

  “Did you leave it at the Burts’?” Jerry said.

  “Somewhere,” Pam said. “It might have been the Burts’. Actually it was probably your office, and you might have somebody look. But I don’t know it wasn’t the Burts’.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Jerry said.

  Pam said she knew he wouldn’t. The question was, should she?

  “No,” Jerry said. “You shouldn’t.”

  Pam said she didn’t see what harm would come of it. Jerry said she never saw what harm would come of it. But harm sometimes did.

  “Never really,” Pam reassured him. “Only almost.”

  “Once I got a broken arm,” Jerry said. “And once I got banged on the head. And once you got chased by—”

  “I know,” Pam said. “That’s what I mean. Only almost. He didn’t catch me.”

  He had, Jerry told her, come too damn near.

  “This is a frail woman in her late forties,” Pam said. “What could she do to me? Even if she wanted to? And if I look at her and she isn’t, then we’re out of it, because it’s the only hunch I have.”

  “Mr. Hill?” Jerry said.

  Pamela North shook her head. She said she had about given up Mr. Hill.

  “Well,” Jerry said, “I wish you’d leave Mrs. Burt to Bill.”

  Bill was not interested, Pam told him. That was the trouble. She might as well cross Mrs. Burt out, if she was out.

  Jerry looked at his watch, made sounds of consternation and stood up. He kissed the back of Pam’s neck, told her to be good, and started for the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Pam said. “The cat’s on you.”

  Jerry stopped and took Martini off his right shoulder. Martini clung and scolded. He put her on Pam’s right shoulder and she began to purr. It was only when he was in a cab on the way to his office that Jerry remembered he had planned to get Pam to promise not to go look at Mrs. Burt.

  “Mrs. Burt is not in,” the maid told Pamela North. “I don’t expect her—”

  “Oh,” Pam said. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “I’m sorry,” the maid said. “Shall I say you called, Miss—er—Mrs.—”

  “North,” Pam said. Then she rather wished she hadn’t because Mrs. Burt, when the maid told her, would wonder why Mrs. North had called.

  “I think I left my compact when I was here yesterday,” Pam said. “With Lieutenant Weigand, you know. And I happened to be passing and just thought I’d—”

  “I don’t think so,” the maid said. “I’d have seen it when I straightened up. What kind of a compact was it?”

  “Plastic,” Pam said. “With a monogram. PN.”

  “No,” the maid said. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Nord.”

  “North,” Pam said. “In that case, don’t bother Mrs. Burt.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. North,” a slow and calm voice said. Mr. Burt was standing in the door from the living-room to the foyer. “Won’t you come in? I heard something about a compact.”

  Pam told him about the compact. She said the compact apparently wasn’t there.

  “Well,” Willard Burt said, “we must be sure of that, Mrs. North. Perhaps we can find it. It may have slipped down somewhere.” He spoke very deliberately, so that there seemed to be tiny pauses between the words. It reminded Mrs. North of the way someone else spoke, but she did not remember who it was. She thought chiefly that she was now faced with a probably exhaustive search for a compact which was almost certainly somewhere else. And that she was wasting time, since she would not get to look at Mrs. Burt. She said it wasn’t important enough to bother about, and Mr. Burt said that of course it was important enough to bother about.

  “In any event it is no bother,” he said. He waited then, expectantly, and Pam went in.

  “I was sitting here,” she said, going to the chair. “It may just have slipped down behind the cushion, of course.” She moved the cushion and looked. “It didn’t,” she said. “I must have left it somewhere else. I’m always leaving them around, Jerry says.”

  Mr. Burt looked several places. He said that it appeared she must have left it somewhere else.

  “As your husband said,” he told her. “I assume, in any event, that the Jerry you speak of is Mr. North?”

  “Yes,” Pam said.

  “His must be an interesting occupation,” Mr. Burt said. “Tracking down the perpetrators of crime.”

  “What?” Pam said. “Oh—no. Jerry’s a publisher. North Books, Inc. He’s not a detective.”

  Mr. Burt said he had jumped to conclusions. A foolish habit of his. Because she was a detective, he had assumed that her husband also was.

  “But I’m not either,” Pam assured him. “We just know a detective. Bill Weigand. Sometimes we just—oh, we get involved, somehow. Because we know him, usually. But this time, of course, because Miss Gipson worked for Jerry. Doing research, you know.”

  “Of course,” Willard Burt said. “I read that in the newspapers. North Books, too. I didn’t make the connection.”

  There was no reason why he should, P
am told him. She thanked him for his help, and apologized for the bother. She moved toward the door. But Mr. Burt did not follow her.

  “It seems to be a very interesting case,” he said. “Not that I know much about murder cases. But naturally, since Helen had written that letter which the police misconstrued, I’ve been reading about this one. I trust Lieutenant Weigand is making progress?”

  Again the methodical manner of his speech reminded Pam of someone else, and again she could not remember of whom it reminded her.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Of course, much of it is confidential. Our being friends with Bill doesn’t change that. Like a doctor.”

  “What?” Mr. Burt said.

  “Like being friends with a doctor,” Pam told him.

  “Naturally, a doctor doesn’t tell much about his cases, and no names. It’s that way with a detective, too.”

  Mr. Burt agreed that that was natural.

  “One thing that struck me,” he said, “was the coincidence. That she was, in a sense, investigating murder when she was murdered. An ironic touch.”

  Mr. Burt wanted to talk, apparently. It was to be expected. It would be natural for him to wonder about a case in which his wife was involved; about which his wife had been questioned. It was natural that he should try to pump her. And it occurred to Pam that, since she couldn’t do what she had come to do, she might pick up something from Mr. Burt. Because, if his wife had been Helen Merton, he might very well know it; he would almost certainly know it.

  Pam agreed that it was ironic. Her tone did not close the conversation.

  “Of course,” Willard Burt said, “the police have no doubt thought of that. But I wondered whether she might not possibly have happened on something in one of the old cases that was—well, perhaps dangerous to know. But no doubt the police have thought of that possibility.”

  “Oh yes,” Pam said. “I think they have. But I don’t think they are really very convinced it was that way.”