The Norths Meet Murder Read online

  “And if you don’t believe me, prove different,” he suggested. “Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do.”

  Weigand said, as darkly as he could manage, that maybe he would, but he did not convince himself and he was not sure he convinced Berex. At any rate, Berex’s rather impudent smile did not falter, and he nodded satirical encouragement.

  “Luck to you,” he said, brightly, and Weigand was aware that he glowered. Berex seemed to be gaining, rather than losing, confidence as time went on, which was not a thing Weigand liked to see in suspects.

  Weigand looked as forbiddingly as he could manage at Berex, nodded with what he hoped might, if Berex were guilty of anything, be taken as emanating from a fund of inner knowledge, and went along. What he needed to do, he decided, was to go some place and think. He looked at his watch and was astonished to discover that it was almost lunch-time. He toyed with the thought of a drink or two, to lubricate thought, tried to convince himself that it was time to be sternly about a policeman’s duties, and walked downtown. A little walk would help, he thought. It had not helped, noticeably, when he discovered that he was in front of Charles Restaurant. His feet turned with comforting independence and carried him in. He sat at the bar and ordered a martini.

  Weigand had found his stool automatically, with most of his mind buried, and he was astonished when a familiar voice spoke from the next one.

  “Personally,” the voice said, “I don’t think people ought to drink this early, do you? Except if it’s special, of course.”

  He pivoted and observed Mrs. North fishing for the olive in the bottom of her glass.

  “I,” she said, “just come for the olives. Don’t they give you fine, big olives, here?”

  “Well,” said Weigand, and looked to see. “Yes,” he said. He seemed to amuse Mrs. North, who showed it.

  “Detective,” she said, and nodded to herself. “Even has to verify olives. Who did it?”

  “What?” said Weigand.

  “Mr. Brent,” Mrs. North said. “Who did him? Or don’t you know yet?”

  The last was in a disappointed and slightly chiding tone.

  “Oh,” said Weigand. “Well, the fact is, we expect—” He looked at Mrs. North. “No,” he said. “I don’t know who did for Mr. Brent. Do you, by any chance?”

  Mrs. North looked surprised, and said of course she did.

  “He left his name,” she said. “Didn’t you know?” Weigand smiled and shook his head. He said he had told her it wasn’t that easy. She sobered and nodded and said all right.

  “I know,” she said. “No, I don’t know who did it. Sometimes I suspect somebody and then I suspect somebody else, but I thought detectives didn’t do it that way.”

  Weigand sighed and said he wished they didn’t, but that sometimes they did. He asked Mrs. North if she had had lunch, having an uneasy feeling that a cocktail wouldn’t prove anything about that, either way. She would say, likely as not, that she always had an olive for dessert. But she had not had lunch, and would be delighted to eat it with him, although Mr. North might be along and join them.

  “But he won’t mind,” she said, leaving Weigand to wonder what Mr. North wouldn’t mind.

  They were led to a table by a captain who beamed on Mrs. North, and assured her that another place could easily be set for Mr. North. Mrs. North had waffles and sausage and Weigand wondered about her digestion. He had broiled sea bass, and wondered a little about his. After a few minutes Mr. North did come, groaned openly over the choices of the other two, and ordered a green salad. Mr. North had passed wondering about his digestion; he knew.

  Before he realized it, Weigand found himself telling the Norths about the case, to date, omitting very little and conveying his own puzzlement. Mr. North looked puzzled, too, and nodded glumly.

  “What do you do next?” Mr. North said, and Weigand, unguarded, said he wished he knew. Mrs. North speared a piece of sausage, consumed it happily and said she had an idea.

  “It just came to me,” she said. “Out of the blue.”

  “Or,” said Mr. North, “out of the martini. I doubt whether Weigand—” But Weigand stopped him, and said you never could tell.

  “Frankly,” he said, “I’d like an idea; something to break the jam. And if she got one out of a martini she’s one up on me.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. North, “it comes out of books, really. Get them all together and spring it on them.”

  “Spring,” said Mr. North, “what?”

  “Right,” said Weigand. “Spring what?”

  “The solution,” Mrs. North said. “That’s what the detective always does. He gets them all together and tells the man who did it that he knows he did it and then he confesses. And there are discrepancies, usually.”

  “Discrepancies?” said Mr. North. “You mean between what the detective thinks and what happens?”

  Mrs. North shook her head. She said she meant in the stories.

  “And when they’re all together, they all come out,” she said. “It always happens, in books.”

  “Well,” said Weigand, “this is the New York Police Department. We don’t get them together, usually. We more often keep them apart.”

  “But,” said Mrs. North, “they are apart. And so’s your solution. And I could give my party.”

  “Listen,” said Mr. North, and Weigand looked at him hopefully. Mrs. North beamed at both of them.

  “The party I was going to give, except for the body,” she said. “Only in our own apartment, of course, except that people can look if they want to, and you don’t mind. A suspect party.”

  “A what?” said Weigand, fascinated.

  “A suspect party,” Mrs. North repeated. “All the suspects, and maybe some other people—people I owe to—and you can come and discover the murderer.”

  Mr. North ran a hand through his hair. Weigand, bowing to superior experience, ran a hand through his hair.

  “Listen,” both men said together. Mr. North waved Weigand on.

  “Well,” said Weigand, “let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You want to give a party for the suspects? Right?”

  “Yes, and some other people I owe to,” Mrs. North said. “People we’ve been to since they’ve been to us. But mostly for suspects.”

  “Yes,” said Weigand. “A party for the suspects. And I’m to get them all talking and find out which one did it? Right?”

  Mrs. North nodded.

  “Only,” she said, “you couldn’t arrest them there. Salt.”

  “What?” said Mr. North, looking at his wife rather anxiously.

  “They’d have eaten it,” Mrs. North said. “So you couldn’t arrest them until they got out. But it won’t be our best friends, so it won’t matter a great deal.”

  Weigand shook his head. He reminded Mrs. North that the Fullers, for example, were still on that list. And Edwards. Mrs. North paused a moment, thoughtfully, and then brightened. She said she was sure, really, it wouldn’t be their best friends, and if it were why, after all, they had killed somebody under their roof and weren’t really friends any longer. Also, and what was more important, she said, they had killed Mr. Barnes, who had been sweet and harmless.

  “And we’ll borrow Kumi to help serve,” she said. “Then we’ll have everybody, only I don’t know Berex or Mrs. Brent. So maybe they wouldn’t come.”

  That, Weigand told her, might be managed. As he spoke, he realized he was beginning to take the plan seriously. It would, he thought, be interesting to get them all together, and see what happened; what sparks flew.

  “Sunday,” Mrs. North said. “Sunday evening, and a buffet supper.”

  “Well,” said Weigand, and turned to Mr. North. “How about you?” he said. “What do you think of it?”

  Mr. North thought of it, his face reflecting thought.

  “If you think it might help,” he said, “I’d be willing. It might, at that.”

  Weigand nodded, slowly. Then he nodded more confidently. With any luck he woul
d have the case broken by Sunday; if he did not, he would be willing to take any reasonable chance to break it. He needn’t mention it to O’Malley, unless it worked, of course.

  “Right,” he said, when he decided. “I’ll take you up on it.”

  “And I’ll send out invitations,” Mrs. North said, “and mark them ‘R.S.V.P. Lieutenant Weigand.’ How would that be?”

  Mr. North looked at the lieutenant a little helplessly, and Weigand grinned over his coffee.

  “Invite your friends,” he said. “The ones you know. I’ll see the rest are there, if the case isn’t broken by then.”

  “And some other people?” Mrs. North said. “Some people who aren’t suspects at all; but sort of fit in? Would that be all right?”

  Weigand could see nothing against it, and said so. He also arranged that he would come rather late, after people had had time for a few drinks and introductions; possibly even after dinner. It occurred to him that coming, cold sober, to a crowd which had already had several drinks might be helpful, and illuminating.

  They called it settled and finished coffee and cigarettes. Then they parted—Mr. North to his office, Mrs. North to have her hair done, Weigand to Headquarters, where Mullins, detecting an odor of cocktails, looked at him reproachfully. Weigand, by that time, had decided that he was letting himself in for a rather foolish plan, and settled down grimly to routine, determined to break the case before Sunday night. All he needed, he told himself, was routine and a hunch. Any time, now, he told himself, a hunch might come.

  20

  FRIDAY

  1:30 P.M. TO Sunday: 9:25 P.M.

  Weigand worried his mind, and went over things, and waited for a hunch. He waited for the hunch all Friday afternoon and evening. He slept on it Friday night and went to Headquarters grimly on Saturday. Things seemed to have stopped entirely. Even routine was running low. By noon the audit of Berex’s account with Edwards was finished and the accountants could report, finally, that everything was in order, so far as records showed. Mullins confided his opinion that it was a screwy case and inquired what they did next.

  “We wait for a break,” Weigand said, as confidently as he could. “There’s always a break, sometime.”

  There always was, too, he assured himself. Digging and a hunch and luck—that summed it up, for a detective. Somebody did a thing which didn’t fit, or made a break or got nervous and tried to run for it. Or somebody finally decided, for motives of his own, to tell a thing he knew and the whole structure was knocked down by the loosening of one foundation stone of falsehood. Hard work and logic were fine things, and hunches when you got them, and just enough luck to serve as a binder. And you always, sooner or later, got the luck.

  It was fine and reassuring and, even as Weigand tried to convince himself, he knew it was not true. “It ain’t necessarily so,” the refrain from a Gershwin song hummed maddeningly in his mind. “It ain’t necessarily so.” Because, sometimes, the luck never came. There were plenty of such cases, some in Weigand’s own experience, although he had been, for the most part, lucky. The stub of a Pullman ticket in the Snyder-Gray case had been luck for the detectives on the case, But luck had never come in the Elwell case. Nor had the stumbling investigators of the Hall-Mills murders stumbled, by chance, on the good fortune they needed. It was fine to argue that murderers always made mistakes, and sometimes they did. And sometimes they didn’t, and there you were. There you were, often enough, nowhere at all; perhaps without even a hunch to help. All men die, and some are murdered, and many who die quietly may have been helped to death. And many who die as unquietly as Brent had died are not, if luck fails, avenged. There was, whatever it was convenient to tell the public, no assurance in the matter. Among those about Brent in life, one, or at most two, had killed him, and the group was not too large. But it was too large to accuse en masse. A needle may be hidden as well in a small, neat folder of needles.

  There was no luck Saturday morning, and no hunch. There was no luck that night and Weigand slept on it again. He regarded the approach of the North suspect party with misgiving, and wondered why he had ever agreed to it. Then he wondered what he would have done if he hadn’t, and sighed. Headquarters was not dead on Sunday; it is never dead. But it was dozing. Routine had congealed to be resumed Monday, if Weigand could, by then, think of a use for routine. He sent Mullins home, telling him to show up at the Norths in the middle of the evening.

  Rather guiltily, Weigand went to a movie. It was a mystery film, full of guns and violent action in the dark, and the murderer conveniently confessed. Weigand snorted and went out and had a drink. Then he had another drink and went home. He sat in his small living-room and stared across it, and decided he had made a mistake in going on the cops. He sat staring for a long time, and then, moodily, he dressed for the party.

  It was still early when he finished and he thought for a moment of abandoning his plan to arrive late. A few drinks and a few people would help, he thought and by taking a taxi downtown he would arrive near the beginning. Then he abandoned the notion, as he was about to lift a hand at a passing cab, and decided to stick to the original plan. He would walk downtown, and perhaps it would clear his mind.

  Weigand walked from his apartment in the West Fifties across town to Sixth Avenue, and turned down it, walking slowly and looking around. He would, he thought vaguely, fill his mind with trivia; let it rest, empty of thoughts of the case. Perhaps, then, something would come bursting into it. He walked south. It was night and Sunday, but men were working on the new subway under flood-lights. Men in helmets which looked like pale brown derby hats emerged from the ground and crossed the street and submerged themselves in the ground again. A construction shack was a glare of light inside. Men were working on blue-prints, at drawing-boards like Berex’s. Weigand walked on, looking in windows.

  A pawnshop window displayed, in Sabbath semidarkness, and behind a netting, a tray of wedding rings and, farther along, a window so bright one could hardly look at it, presented bedroom suites and lamps dripping with fringe. Weigand shuddered at the fringe and passed a store where knickknacks filled a window. Leaning against the side of the building, trustfully, was a picket’s sign, abandoned until Monday brought pickets back again. “Do Not Buy NAZI GOODS!” it commanded, illustrating its text with a picture of a lowering brute, swastika bedecked, planting a boot on a shrinking child. Weigand wondered what that sort of thing had done to Fuller’s importing business, and how he felt about it.

  The next window was full of radios and, a little further along, a tiny sporting goods store offered footballs and skates and a couple of tennis racquets left over from the summer. There was also equipment for paddle tennis, which a sign said was the new indoor game for winter, and a neat display of golf clubs. A golf club made an ugly weapon, Weigand thought, looking at one with a steel shaft and head. He wondered how many of his suspects played golf, and entered the section of sewing-machines and wholesale florists. All the florists’ windows were bare.

  It was hard, Weigand realized, to kill time merely by walking. He pulled his muffler close to hide his white shirt and black tie and stopped in a counter restaurant for a sandwich and coffee. The coffee, pale with milk and already sweetish, came in a cup which seemed to have been hollowed from a solid chunk of porcelain. It was too heavy to lift comfortably; it would, Weigand realized, make a fine weapon. He had another cup of coffee, black, and thought that lawyers lived a good life, and paid twenty cents to a weary young man who leaned at the far end of the counter in a not very clean white apron and read Monday morning’s Daily News. Weigand walked on south.

  There were few people on the street in the Twenties. There were more south of Twelfth Street, and drugstores and restaurants predominated along the sidewalks. Drugstores displayed cosmetics; restaurants seemed, for the most part, to devote themselves to shellfish on beds of ice. Posters in a travel agency invited him to abandon everything and sail around the world. The United Cigar Store urged alarm-clocks, and patented ash-
trays, and special offers of shaving-cream and razor-blades upon him. Weigand remembered that he still hadn’t sent his guarantee voucher to the manufacturer of the electric razor and thought he had had a good hunch about that, anyway.

  He passed the Jefferson Market Magistrate’s Court, and the House of Detention for Women, which looked so much like an apartment house that strangers were always trying to rent flats in it. He wondered if he would provide lodging, temporary and a prelude to something worse, to any of the women who had known Brent. He thought of Claire Brent and Jane Fuller and Pamela North and hoped that he would have nothing to do with caging any of them there. But he did not, he realized, want to cage anybody. He felt no animus, except for his annoyance at being blocked.

  It was a puzzle with pieces missing, and one is not annoyed at the maker of a puzzle. The pieces were around somewhere. He passed a used car lot and paused to look at the cars, deceptively shining. He wondered about their gears, and what they were packed with to disguise any inconvenient grinding, and whether any of them would make it from Carmel to downtown New York in, say, an hour and forty minutes. Most of them wouldn’t, he decided, but he knew at least one that would—and knew who owned it. It would be helpful if cars could speak up and tell where they had been driven on Monday afternoon.

  And if Berex’s drawing-board could speak up and report on the words and thoughts of its owner; if the shops and windows he had passed could tell him whether Fuller had walked that way on Monday, and if so at what time, he would call them blessed. If even the fringed lampshades could break silence, he would forgive them their monstrosity and—

  Suddenly Weigand stopped, because something was stirring in his mind. He waited, hardly breathing—something was coming, something was clicking into place—something he had seen had laid a train to—

  “Well,” Weigand said. “Well, I’ll be damned. So that’s it!”

  He walked on toward the Norths, but now he was walking briskly, because for the first time he was pretty sure he knew where he was going.