The Norths Meet Murder Page 17

  “Your father, wasn’t he?” Weigand said, suddenly. “It was your father killed a man in a fight and went to prison. And you revenged him. Right?”

  “No,” Kumi said. “No, pliss. Not father.” He paused. “Brother,” he said. “Kensuke my brother. But I not kill anybody.”

  “Now,” Weigand said, “we’re getting places. Kensuke was your brother and when he got sent to prison it made you mad, didn’t it? Angry? You wanted to get the man who put him there? Right? And that man was Mr. Brent.”

  “No,” Kumi said. “I not kill anybody.”

  Mullins offered again to give him a going over, with a couple of the other boys. “Not a hand on him, Loot,” he said. “Not a hand. Just a little light and a few questions for a while.”

  It might, Weigand thought, have to come to that. But perhaps—

  “Well, Kumi,” he said, “we’ll say it was your brother. Were you fond of your brother?”

  Kumi nodded.

  “Tried to help him when he got in trouble?” Weigand asked.

  Kumi nodded again.

  “Yes, pliss,” Kumi said.

  “Of course,” Weigand said. “And you got him a lawyer, probably. Helped him get a lawyer?”

  Kumi said yes.

  “And you thought he got a dirty break when he was convicted?”

  “Pliss?”

  “You thought—you thought it was unfair to send him to prison because he got in a fight and killed a man who was after him?”

  Kumi shook his head.

  “He break law,” he said. “Man who break law should be punished.”

  He said it simply, and Weigand had an uneasy suspicion that he meant it. But you couldn’t tell about men; particularly about men of another race. He started to nod to Mullins, surrendering Kumi to a going over, and then stopped. They might, of course, break him down. They might get admissions; they probably would get admissions. But perhaps they could get along without it, and perhaps they had now all they were going to get, except by digging. And Kumi looked rather small, beside Mullins, and—

  “You know jiu-jitsu?” he said to Kumi.

  Kumi shook his head.

  “No, pliss,” he said. “I am not athlete. I quiet man.”

  He certainly, sitting there under the light, looked a quiet man. But then, probably, his brother had looked a quiet man, too. Weigand shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think probably you’re lying to me. If you are you’re in bad trouble. But maybe you’re not.”

  “I not lying,” Kumi said, eagerly. “I kill nobody.”

  That, Weigand told him, was what he said.

  “We’ll look into it,” he said. “We’ll find out if you are lying, and if you are, you’re in bad trouble. But now I’m going to let you go home. But we’ll be watching you all the time. We’ll know everything you do, everybody you meet. If you killed Mr. Brent we’ll find out. Don’t think you’re getting away with anything.”

  “No, pliss,” Kumi said. “I not get away with anything.”

  Weigand nodded at Mullins.

  “Right,” he said. “Mr. Mullins will take you out, and you can get a subway uptown. Don’t try to run.”

  Kumi shook his head. Kumi would not run, pliss. He looked scared. But he did not look very scared.

  “All right,” Weigand said, to Mullins. “Let him out. Keep an eye on him.”

  Mullins led him out and returned in a few minutes, looking much less contented.

  “All right,” he said. “There’s a man on him. But listen, Loot. You’d ought to have let me work on him.”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “Perhaps I ought. Perhaps in a day or so, I will. Meanwhile, you might have a look at that.” Weigand tossed over the report from the Danbury police. Mullins said that he’d be damned.

  “Maybe they all did it,” Mullins said. “Sort of a gang, huh? They got this guy on the spot and—”

  Weigand said that he didn’t think so.

  “It’s a funny one, all right,” he said. “A very funny one.” He looked at his watch. It was a little short of ten o’clock. “Come on,” he said.

  “The Brent dame’s?” Mullins said.

  “Right,” said Weigand. “And maybe the Berex guy’s,” he added.

  17

  THURSDAY

  10:10 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT

  Mrs. Brent’s manner was not cordial. She said, “Really, Lieutenant,” with inflection. But Weigand was not cordial, either. He looked at her and ignored the evidence that, under the thin hostess gown, there was the attraction of rounded suppleness.

  “Sit down, please, Mrs. Brent,” he said. She hesitated, looked at him, and sat down. Weigand and Mullins, who glowered, remained standing.

  “Well,” Weigand said, “I tried to make it easy. I tried to be nice and a little gentleman. Maybe that gave you wrong ideas?”

  His voice was not high or bullying, but it was not friendly. Mrs. Brent looked inquiring.

  “Is there,” she said, “something wrong? Something new wrong?”

  Weigand said you could call it that.

  “I’ll give you another chance,” he said. “What did you do Monday afternoon? You can leave out the painting, the Danbury Fair.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mrs. Brent said. “It was like—”

  Weigand said no, it wasn’t like she had said. Not at all like she had said.

  “You missed something,” he assured her. “People who lie often miss something. The fair closed Sunday.”

  Mrs. Brent said, “Oh,” with a little gasp.

  “That does make me look pretty silly,” she said. “I didn’t know. I thought it had just begun Saturday.”

  Weigand told her she was a week off, and waited.

  “Well,” she said, “I really meant to go to the fair. But not alone. I may as well tell you.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “You may as well. And don’t make it fancy, this time.”

  It wasn’t fancy. She had, she said, planned to go to the fair, as she had told her maid, but she had planned to take Louis Berex with her. He had never been to the fair, and she thought he would like it. “Lots of people go up from New York,” she pointed out. Weigand nodded. The plan had been that she would meet Louis Berex at the railroad station in Brewster and drive over to Danbury, see the fair, and drop him at the station again afterward. But they hadn’t done that.

  “We started to,” she said. “But it was a lovely day, you remember. Like summer, but full of color. And we decided we didn’t want to be in a crowd.”

  So, after driving a few miles toward Danbury, they had turned off onto a side road, and then onto another side road and finally, miles from anywhere on a one-lane road near the top of a hill from which they could look down the Croton valley, they had stopped the car. They had pulled to the side of the road and got out and walked up to the very top of the hill and sat there in the warm sun, looking out over the valley and at the bright hills.

  “And time just passed,” Claire Brent said. “We sat there, and there was nobody near and time passed. We talked and—”

  “And?” Weigand said.

  “Just talked,” Claire Brent said. “It was a lovely afternoon.”

  “And why,” Weigand wanted to know, “did you tell me this other yarn? About the picture and scraping the canvas, and all that?”

  She looked at him.

  “Really, Lieutenant Weigand,” she said. “Why should I? I was alone, far from anybody, with a man not my husband. Why should I—shout it? It made no difference to you, really; I was just as far from town as I would have been at the fair. It would have looked bad, in the newspapers. People would have talked about us, and suggested all sorts of things. After all, Lieutenant, why squander a reputation?”

  She gave, Weigand thought, every indication of being entirely naive about it. He wondered whether it was possible she did not know how much people were talking, or what they were saying, about her and Louis Berex. He decided that it was, of course
, possible. Still—

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, and felt cruel as he said it, “as a matter of fact, Berex is your lover, isn’t he?”

  Claire Brent stood up in one rhythmic movement.

  “Lieutenant Weigand!” she said. She stared at him. He stared back.

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t give a damn. Your habits are nothing to me, you know. I’m a cop. I have things to find out. You’re just another fact to me.”

  “What has that got to do with it?” she said.

  He continued to stare at her. He said he thought she could figure it out, if she tried. She was still and cold, and after a moment she nodded.

  “You’d have to prove it, wouldn’t you?” she said. “You couldn’t just guess about it, could you?”

  “Maybe I can prove it, if I have to,” Weigand told her.

  She nodded, and said she couldn’t stop him trying.

  “But,” she said, “I can get you out of here and I can stop answering questions. And I can get a lawyer and find out what right you have to ask questions, can’t I?”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “Sure.”

  “All right,” Claire Brent said. “Now suppose you get out of here!”

  There was hard anger in her voice, finally. Weigand said, right, if that was the way it was going to be, that was the way it was going to be. He gathered Mullins, who looked darkly on Mrs. Brent, and got out.

  “Wow,” said Mullins, when they were out. “You’ve sure got a way with dames, Loot.”

  Weigand told him to shut up. They went in search of Berex, but Berex was not at home. Nor was he at his office. Mullins said how would it be if they called it a day? Weigand frowned on him and took him back to Headquarters. It was time, Weigand decided, to do a bit of thinking.

  “You can just sit,” he told Mullins, unkindly. Mullins said, “Hey, listen, Loot.”

  At Headquarters, Weigand tossed a full package of cigarettes to his desk, switched on a hooded light and pulled off his necktie. Mullins recognized symptoms of thought, and sighed. Weigand took a pile of yellow paper from a drawer of his desk and put it in front of him. He lighted a cigarette and stared at the paper.

  “O.K.” said Mullins, “the Brent dame.”

  “Claire Brent,” Weigand wrote at the top of the first sheet.

  “Could she of?” Mullins said.

  “Have,” said Weigand. “Could she have.”

  “That’s what I say,” Mullins said. “Could she of?”

  Weigand leaned back.

  “Physically,” he said, “yes. She’s a strong girl, in good condition. She knows how to hit; probably has a free swing, at least for a woman, and is accustomed to reaching up and hitting down from her tennis. She could move fast if she had to, probably faster than Brent, who was no athlete. With an ice-mallet, or something like that, she could do plenty of damage. Probably, with a little effort, she could have dragged Brent into the bathroom after she knocked him out, and hit him a couple more times.”

  “Yeh,” said Mullins, “I think so. Yeh.”

  He paused.

  “Was she there?” he said.

  Weigand said wait a minute, and noted down a summary of what he had just said. Under Claire Brent’s name he wrote the summary in two words, “Strong enough.”

  “Was she there?” he repeated then. “We don’t know. We know what she says—what she said first and what she said the second time. She was in the country, either at the Danbury Fair, which had closed the day before, or on the top of a hill, looking at the pretty scenery with Berex. Berex will say she was with him, and she will say he was with her. But she was away from the house, and as far as we know, nobody but Berex saw her from a little after lunchtime until about six. She says herself she can drive in from Carmel to her apartment in town, which is about the same distance as to the Buano house, in two hours at the outside. She can, too; I’ve had it checked. She could do it in an hour and forty minutes, if she hurried. She could have driven in, killed her husband, and driven out again. It’s just about the right interval of time. But we haven’t proved anything yet, and it would be hard to prove anything.”

  “Yeh,” Mullins said, “it’s what I think. She could of.”

  Weigand jotted down, under “Strong enough,” the words: “Opportunity? Maybe.”

  “Weapon?” Mullins said. “You want to think about the weapon?”

  “We can’t,” Weigand said, “prove anything about that, one way or another. If it was an ice-mallet, anybody could have bought one and thrown it away afterward. It’s the kind of weapon anybody could get, use and destroy or throw away. Maybe drop down an incinerator. Is there an incinerator at No. 34?”

  “Sure,” said Mullins. “In the service hall. Sure.”

  “And probably she had a mallet in the country,” Weigand said. “Or she might have had a croquet-mallet in the country, and brought it in and thrown it away, anywhere, going back out. Or not thrown it away, but just wiped it off and banged it in the dirt a few times. She is, incidentally, the only person we’ve run across who might have had a croquet-mallet handy. And there’s another thing. She’s been hitting things all her life—tennis balls, anyway. If she wanted to kill, she might naturally think of doing it by hitting.”

  “Yeh,” Mullins said. “I’d been thinking that.”

  Weigand wrote: “Weapon—available” on the sheet of paper. Mullins opened his mouth, but Weigand waved it shut.

  “We could show a motive,” he said. “We could, really, show several. She’s in love with Berex, whatever she says. Maybe she thought it was the simplest way of getting rid of a husband who is in the way. Although why not divorce, I wouldn’t know.”

  “They do, though,” Mullins said. “Mrs. Snyder, for instance. The sash-weight lady.”

  “Yes,” Weigand said, “they do. But Mrs. Brent might have had a stronger motive—a couple of stronger motives. Maybe, in spite of Berex, she still loved Brent; maybe Berex was just revenge for Brent’s playing around. And maybe she got desperate, after a while, at Brent’s two-timing her and decided to bash him. That’s happened too.”

  Mullins said it had, sure enough.

  “But the most likely motive,” Weigand said, “would be the insurance. That would combine with the first motive, too—explain why it was better to kill than get a divorce. If she killed and got away with it, she’d collect a hundred grand and she and Berex could spend it. That’s a nice motive, all right.”

  “Mrs. Snyder and Judd Gray,” Mullins said. “Like I was saying.” He thought a moment.

  “Listen, Loot,” he said, “I think we’ve got it. I think we ought to pick her up.”

  Weigand wrote down “Motive—plenty,” and leaned back in his chair. He crushed out his cigarette, and then lighted another. “Maybe,” he said. “We’ll look at the others, though. Take Berex.”

  Weigand leaned forward and wrote “Louis Berex” on the sheet of yellow paper. Mullins sighed.

  “O.K., Loot, if you want to,” he said. “Could he of?”

  Physically, Weigand said, it was hard to say. Berex was slight, slighter than Brent. But he was wiry and moved vigorously. Making allowance for the difference in strength natural between men and women, he was probably as strong as Claire Brent, although he was not so strong for a man as she for a woman. Probably, on grounds of physical ability, he would have to be counted in. Mullins nodded and said, “Yeh, I guess so.” Opportunity? So far as Weigand could see, Berex’s was identical with Mrs. Brent’s, equally hard to prove or disprove, equally certain to be supported by one person and by no more—and that one person obviously a prejudiced witness. He could have left Mrs. Brent sitting on the hill, looking at the pretty autumn leaves, borrowed her car, driven to New York, killed, driven her car back to the country and returned it to her, been driven by her to the railroad station in Brewster, caught a train back to New York.

  But, and here was a point, if he were to be counted in on opportunity, did it not necessarily imply that he and Mr
s. Brent were in it together, at least to the extent that she would countenance murder and provide an alibi for the murderer?

  Mullins nodded, and said it sure looked like it.

  It did, Weigand agreed, but it might be got around. Berex might have invented some urgent and hidden errand—such as a secret meeting somewhere near about one of his inventions—and have sold her on the story, particularly if she were in love with him, and ready to believe. He could, for example, have invented an important meeting with the engineers of the big United Electric plant a few miles outside Danbury. Her belief in such a story would, incidentally, explain more satisfactorily why she had lied in her first account. She wanted to keep Berex out of it entirely, not so much for the sake of her reputation, as to lessen any chance that his secret might be exposed.

  “It could be that way,” Weigand said. “With a little time, anyone could invent a perfectly satisfactory story for Berex to tell her.”

  In that event, of course, she would give an alibi to Berex to prevent anyone’s suspicion that he was, really, engaged in secret negotiations—or whatever he had said he was engaged in. “That’s just one story he might have told, of course,” Weigand said. “It might be any of a dozen others.”

  Mullins said, “Yeh,” but rather doubtfully.

  “If you ask me, they were both in it,” he said.

  The weapon, Weigand went on, rubbing his ideas against Mullins, was still one that anybody might have had.

  “Suppose,” he said, “we figure that anybody we suspect could have got the weapon, or, for that matter, anybody we don’t suspect. Right?”

  Mullins said it was O.K. with him.

  Then, Weigand said, they came to motive, and there they were all right, again, assuming Berex and Claire Brent to be in love. It might have been, although Weigand doubted it, chivalry—avenging the marital betrayal of his beloved on the betrayer.

  “Hooey!” said Mullins. “That don’t sound right.”

  Weigand agreed that it didn’t, although he could, he assured Mullins, give him cases in which murder had resulted from such a situation—when a hotheaded lover had avenged bloodily a slight to his mistress.