Murder Out of Turn Page 17

  The place they indicated was a few feet off the back road which, circling the lake and passing close to the dam, wandered off uncertainly through the country, but finally joined the Patterson road, which connects with Route 22. The tubing had been thrown into some underbrush at the edge of a level clearing by the side of this road and the long grass in the clearing seemed to have been trampled. The trooper—“showing some sense for a change,” Heimrich interjected—had lain flat on the grass, to the considerable amusement of the boys, and sniffed vigorously. He reported that gasoline had apparently been spilled there.

  “And Van Horst thinks the tubing probably was cut off the length in his place,” Heimrich said. “So we can figure that somebody cut it off when Van Horst wasn’t around, as he generally isn’t, and used it to siphon gas. Which gets us nowhere, because anybody here could have driven over there—at night or even in the daytime—and done the trick in a few minutes. No marks on the tubing, of course; no tire tracks, or anything helpful.”

  Weigand nodded. Still, he said, they might find out eventually that it fitted in. And if they did, it would be nice at the trial.

  “Give the jury something to pass around,” he pointed out. “Pleases juries, that does.”

  “Yeh?” said Heimrich. “What jury?”

  Weigand admitted that, for the moment anyway, Heimrich had him there.

  “So …” said Heimrich. “Well, I’ll jog the boys up a little. Maybe somebody’s come back. Although not that my Boy Scouts would have seen them, of course.”

  He went away, still disgruntled. Weigand joined the Norths and Mullins in the cabin. A small fire was burning on the hearth, and Mr. North, looking incongruously battered but not unhappy, was sitting on the couch. His functioning hand held a drink. So did Mullins’ hand. Mrs. North set her drink down, and told Weigand he was just in time.

  “Did you,” she inquired, “ever see anything like that?” Her head indicated her husband. “Do you realize, he can’t do a thing—not a thing? That I have to do everything—drinks and fire and get water. And that he just purrs?”

  Everybody looked at Mr. North.

  “Purr,” Mrs. North commanded. Mr. North purred.

  Mrs. North looked at Weigand and they both shook their heads.

  “Did that sound like a purr to you?” Mrs. North asked, doubtfully. Weigand shook his head again.

  “You purr,” Mrs. North directed. Weigand purred.

  “That,” Mrs. North said, “was just plain snort. This is a purr.” Mrs. North purred. Weigand and Mr. North looked at each other, and shook their heads.

  “No,” Mr. North said, “I’m afraid not. Close, perhaps, but not really purring. How about Mullins?”

  Mullins looked abashed and consulted the lieutenant. “Purr,” Weigand ordered. Mullins purred.

  “I think,” Mrs. North said, “that you’d better mix your own drink, Bill. And then dinner will be ready. Maybe we can purr better after dinner. And then you can tell us everything.”

  The fireplace fire grew brighter as the room darkened and Weigand, over a drink and then as they sat at the dinner table, told them “everything.” He told them, in rather greater detail, all that he had told Heimrich. And he told them also, speaking slowly and with a good many pauses for the exact word, of Dorian Hunt’s appearance at the Wilson apartment. When he had finished, his tone left the topic open.

  “And,” said Mrs. North, “that puzzled you. You being a man and everything.”

  “For ‘everything’ read ‘policeman,’” Weigand said. “Don’t you think it was puzzling?”

  “Yes,” Mr. North said, fishing awkwardly for a piece of meat with an unschooled left hand. “A very funny business. Damn!”

  “You poor lamb,” Mrs. North said. “I’ll get it.” She got it and, when Mr. North opened his mouth in pleased anticipation, popped it in. “There’s nothing puzzling about it at all, only she’s a woman.”

  “Granting,” Mr. North said, and chewed, “gender, I still think it’s puzzling. Not as puzzling as if it were a man, of course. Nothing is.”

  “What?” said Mrs. North. “Does that mean something?”

  “Things that would be puzzling in a man aren’t in a woman,” Mr. North amplified. “That goes without saying.”

  Mrs. North looked at him suspiciously. He looked at her blandly.

  “Anyway,” Mrs. North said, obviously putting the matter away for another time, “it seems perfectly simple to me, considering everything. She wanted to get the picture.”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “I don’t see that you explain it, Pam. We knew she just wanted to get the picture, didn’t we? And it’s still puzzling, isn’t it?”

  “I think you and Jerry are outrageous,” Mrs. North said. “Detective Mullins understands perfectly, don’t you—” she hesitated—“Detective Mullins.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Detective Mullins. “I guess the Loot will understand all right, though.”

  Detective Mullins, having thus transferred responsibility to its proper setting, helped himself to more meat.

  “Men,” said Mrs. North. She said it hopelessly. “All men,” she amplified. Two men, thus reduced to an obviously unsavory microcosm, waited.

  “It was her father,” Mrs. North explained. “And everything she had been through. It left her—oh, upset, sensitive. And then this. A man could have been calm and reasonable, but to her things sort of swelled up, out of proportion. They do, with women—I don’t know why. So when this came along and seemed, somehow, to connect up with that other bad time—well, she just had to do something. She had to keep the things from getting tangled, and keep her father out of it. Her father has always been very close to her, I imagine. And when there was all that trouble—well, her feeling became more than normally intense, and she magnified little things. Like the picture. So all she knew was that she had to get the picture, because it connected her father up with something else that was disturbing and frightening and—”

  She looked at Mr. North and then at Weigand.

  “Oh,” she said. “You’d have to be a woman. Women. I know just how she felt. It was just the way a woman would feel.” She looked swiftly at her husband. “Women are funny, Jerry,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Yes,” Jerry North said. “Only I didn’t know they knew.”

  “That,” Mrs. North said, “was very stupid of you. And that’s the way it was with Dorian.”

  Weigand looked thoughtfully at the fire, pushing back his chair.

  “I can’t say you make it much clearer, Pam,” he said. “Or much—safer.”

  His voice trailed off.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. North said. “It’s clear to me, Bill. And safe.”

  There was a rather long pause.

  “In a sense,” Weigand said, then, “I feel as you do about it. That it was—well, call it an impulse; the impulse of a sensitive and imaginative person under strain. I can see it that way. But I can see it another way, too.” He looked into the fire. “Being a policeman,” he said. “Among other things.

  “The trouble is,” he went on after another moment, “is that once we accept irrationality, under circumstances like these, we accept anything. It becomes difficult to draw a line between little unreasonable things and big unreasonable things. I don’t mean they are the same, or that there isn’t a line. I don’t mean that an impulse to get a picture, for example, isn’t a tremendously different thing from an impulse to—well, kill. Different from inside, that is—different to the person concerned. But it is very difficult to draw that line from outside. And as a policeman, I have to.”

  He lighted a cigarette and sent the match twirling into a blue flame which wrapped itself around a log.

  “We meet every day,” he said, “people who appear, from outside, to be irrational. It may merely mean that their minds are quicker than ours—that they jump steps, in speech and in action. Inside, to themselves, they are completely rational. We meet emotional people who do things on i
mpulse, and they are usually fine people—people we like. Interesting people. And then, if you are a policeman, you meet other people who look much the same, and act on impulses—and when they have an impulse to kill somebody, or set fire to a tenement, they act on that impulse, too.”

  “But that’s silly,” Mrs. North said. “Anybody can tell.”

  That, Weigand said, was true only under certain circumstances. If you knew an impulsive person really well, closely, you could eventually come close to predicting, not the course or extent of any individual impulse, but the general limits beyond which impulse couldn’t go. Long acquaintance, affection, perhaps—with these things you could come to tell, accurately enough. But it was hard to tell while you were still looking on from outside.

  Mrs. North smiled, very gently, at the “still.” But nobody else noticed it.

  “The trouble is,” Weigand went on, “that murder, too, is always irrational. We talk about motives for murder, but there are no rational motives for murder. The hazard is always greater than any goal, unless you are immediately defending your life. Murder becomes possible only when a motive—an advantage to be gained, that is—swells up irrationally in the mind. Gets out of perspective. When the possible gain swells so that you cannot perceive the risk. You needn’t be insane for it to do that, or much more emotionally—well, swept—than the average. It may merely catch you when your resources are weak. The gangster intentionally weakens his sense of danger before he kills, usually by using drugs. If you commonly yield to impulse, you may weaken resistance. Or, equally, you may not.”

  He stared into the fire. Subconsciously, he wondered why he was saying all this—what waiting period these words were filling.

  “I suppose that all I’m saying is that a tendency to yield to impulse in any person is more or less what, as a policeman, I’m looking for among any given number of people who may have committed a crime,” he said. “Particularly a murder. And—well, there you have it.”

  “No,” Mrs. North said. “You’re not thinking straight, Bill. There’s something wrong in it. You’re getting lost.”

  Weigand threw his cigarette into the fire and said maybe he was.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m wool-gathering, for some reason. I’m—”

  “You’re talking about something merely because you want to talk about it,” Mrs. North said. “Or—about somebody. Somebody your mind wants to hang onto, and worry about. Even when there isn’t any cause. You’re making an argument because it keeps you close to—all right, Bill, to Dorian Hunt. Did you know that, Bill?”

  “Pam!” Mr. North’s voice was warning. “You’re talking nonsense, Pam.”

  “Am I, Bill?” Pam North insisted. “Do you want to say I’m talking nonsense, Bill? Maybe I am, you know.”

  “Sure,” said Weigand. “Maybe you are, Pam.” He shut thought out, made his voice lighter. “Anyway, Pam, not before children,” he said. “Remember Mullins, Pamela. Remember Mullins.”

  “Oh,” said Pam. “Mullins is all right, aren’t you, Mullins?”

  There was no answer.

  “Mullins is asleep, I think,” Mr. North said. “Anyway, he’s gone over to the couch. He looks asleep.”

  They investigated. Mullins was asleep. Weigand woke him up and he said, “O.K., Loot.”

  “The mighty Mullins,” Mrs. North said, pleased. “Fidelity. Even when asleep.”

  They lighted more lamps, and their brightness chased shadows, too, from Weigand’s mind. A new briskness, also, was apparent in the Norths.

  “All this to the side,” Mrs. North said. “Are you getting places?”

  Weigand looked at her with interest, and then nodded.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I think I am. I think it’s all in. And I think there’s enough of it.”

  “But then—” Mrs. North said, and her husband, too, looked at Weigand expectantly. He did not answer directly, and they searched his face. “You know!” Mrs. North said. “And all this—all this really didn’t count!”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “say I hope I know. I did want your reaction to Dorian’s visit to the apartment. Forget the rest—say I was just talking, and put any reason to it you like. I want to check what I remember. About Blair, particularly. I think it may hang on that.”

  “Blair?” Mr. North said. “But he’s in the hospital. Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. They think he’ll be all right. He recovered consciousness this afternoon for a little while, but not enough to be questioned. But by tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow?” Weigand said. “You’re sure of that?”

  “Why,” Mr. North said, “I’m fairly sure. Somebody called up the hospital, I think—I believe it was that chap Kennedy. He stopped by to see how I was making out, and said something about it. But Heimrich would know, wouldn’t he?”

  Weigand’s mind moved, now, with sudden swiftness, and there returned to it that odd feeling of urgency. Would Heimrich know?

  He ought to know, certainly; there ought to have been a guard on Blair. But he wasn’t sure that anybody had thought it worth while, or that Heimrich had wanted to spare the men to guard a man not expected to recover consciousness for a good many hours. But if he had, and if Heimrich did not know—

  “Listen,” he said, “tell me this. You were both here when we questioned Blair. He told us what he did Saturday, from the time he got up until we found Helen Wilson’s body. I want you, together, to go over that and tell me what you remember—without my prompting. I want to see if your memories check mine. So—they got up Saturday morning, and—”

  Working it out together, checking each other, adding memories of what Blair had said out of the order of their saying, the Norths pieced it together. Weigand shook his head. They pieced it together again, adding a point here and there. And then, at one moment of Blair’s day, Weigand suddenly stopped them, and had them check it again. They agreed.

  “All right,” Weigand said. “We remember it the same way.* And of course you see it, now?”

  The Norths looked at each other. Each waited for the other. And finally, puzzled, they shook their heads.

  “Well,” Lieutenant Weigand said, and it could not be denied that he appeared to be a little gratified, “I think it’s there, all right. Just keep looking.”

  And then he sobered.

  “Only,” he said, “if I’m right, it isn’t over. If I’m right, the murderer—” He stood up, suddenly. “Mullins!” he said. His tone was all policeman. “Come on, Mullins. We’re going places.”

  * If the reader, also, wishes to refresh his memory of John Blair’s statement he may read on pages 85 to 87 all that Lieutenant Weigand and Mr. and Mrs. North heard.

  17

  MONDAY

  8:43 P.M. TO 8:54 P.M.

  The New York Central’s Chatham express, out of Grand Central at 7:19, due at Brewster at 8:38, was five minutes late that Monday evening. At 8:43 it stopped impatiently at the Brewster station and puffed eagerly to be on its way. Dorian Hunt’s heels clicked on the steel floor of the smoking-car vestibule and an official hand on her elbow gave her unneeded assistance. Her heels clicked on the concrete of the station’s floor and beyond the doors on the station’s entrance platform. Then they stopped clicking, while Dorian looked around.

  The Wilson car, which Arthur Kennedy had promised to drive in to meet the 8:38, was not among the little group of waiting cars. He hadn’t, apparently, been able to get through Lieutenant Heimrich’s loosely drawn cordon of troopers; possibly, Dorian thought, there had been a stricter watch since her easy escape of the morning. Which meant a taxicab.

  But there were no taxicabs, either. She looked where there should be taxicabs, and one of the small town’s anomalous guides offered counsel.

  “They’re all out, miss,” he said. “Brisco said to tell anybody there’d be a car back in about twenty minutes, or half an hour, maybe. They’ve all gone to meet.”

  This cryptic report meant to Dorian Hunt merely that t
here was no cab available. It meant to the young man in the leather windbreaker that all of the cars owned, and operated, by Salvatore Brisco were at the moment engaged in getting people from the countryside, so that they might be brought to the station for the 9:12 to New York. Miss Hunt nodded and asked the young man in the windbreaker if he could think of anything. He thought, wrinkling his brow to prove it, and shook his head.

  “Guess not, miss,” he said. “Just have to wait.”

  Dorian Hunt hesitated a moment. Brewster offered few enticements to the becalmed traveler. Then she appeared to make up her mind and her heels clicked off. They clicked across the street and along the sidewalk which climbed the hill to the left. Then they clicked up the sidewalk of the steeper grade to the right and on toward a square brick building of which Brewster was proud—a new brick building, with a semicircular drive in front and a neat plaque at the right of the door announcing: “Brewster Memorial Hospital.” The plaque did not reveal what was memorialized.

  Miss Hunt, who might be combining sympathy with necessity, went into the Brewster Memorial Hospital.

  Dr. James Harlan Abel got off a rear car of the 8:38 when it arrived at 8:43. He saw the slight, swiftly moving figure of Dorian Hunt under the station lights and his uninterested eyes lingered a moment. Then his path diverged. He crossed the street diagonally and walked down Main Street, looking at the parked cars. He found the car he was looking for and his eyes flicked the empty driving seat. He halted in front of the car he had chosen, and for the first time hesitated. Then his shoulders moved in the slightest of shrugs. He walked on along Main Street and turned into a drugstore a few doors farther along. He sat at the soda-fountain and ordered a Coca-Cola, and as he drank it kept his eyes on the street.

  At 8:48, the Wilsons’ middle-aged Pontiac nosed into a parking space in front of the station and Arthur Kennedy jumped out, leaving a long-faced, rather bitter-looking girl on the seat. He went into the station quickly, looked at the clock, compared it with his watch and said, “Damn.” Then he went back to the car. It was empty and he made a sound of vexation. He looked around and apparently did not find what he was looking for. He crossed the street and went into a bar.