Untidy Murder Read online

  “Helms is your man,” Stanton told him. Stanton waved at the door to Helms’s office. “His assistant, Helms is—was. They were in and out of one another’s offices most of the day. They were pretty well acquainted outside the office, too. If Wilming said anything, it might be to Helms.”

  Stanton stopped and looked at the door to the other office.

  “Anybody tell him?” Stanton said, and nodded toward the door. Nobody answered. Stanton looked at Vilma St. John. He shook his head. “Known each other for years,” Stanton said. “It’ll upset him. Make him no good for days, probably, and just when we’re going in.” He seemed aggrieved, suddenly. “The damnedest things happen to me,” he said, conversationally. “The damnedest things.”

  He looked at the detective sergeant and seemed, Dorian thought, to be blaming him. The detective sergeant looked puzzled.

  “I wonder if you want me?” Dorian said. She said it to the detective sergeant, who turned to her and seemed to find her easier to understand. “I only came to show Mr. Wilming some drawings. I’d only met him once before. I don’t work here.” The detective sergeant nodded at each of her points. “And I have an engagement,” she said.

  “You’re Miss Hunt,” the detective sergeant said, and looked at his notebook. “Miss Dorian Hunt. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ll want a statement,” he said. “Just a few words. I’ll take it first if you like, and your address in case anything further comes up. All right, Miss Hunt?”

  She nodded. She waited while, politely, the detective sergeant walked to the door with Stanton, ushering him out. Patrolman Robby and the uniformed sergeant went with the two; they formed for a moment a little group by the door. Watching them, as one watches movement, Dorian almost missed another movement; glimpsed it only, inadequately. She could hardly have sworn, she realized, that in the instant of the little grouping at the door Vilma St. John had bent swiftly and picked up something from the floor. It was only an impression that the thing she had picked up was small, and blue. It might have been, Dorian thought, the torn corner of a piece of blue carbon paper.

  The receptionist was standing, certainly, with a hand on the desk—a hand holding nothing, with fingers spread—when the detective sergeant turned back. He smiled at the girl and asked her how she was feeling, and suggested there should be somewhere she could go and lie down for a bit.

  “I’m all right,” the girl said. But she appeared for a moment reluctant to abandon the support of the desk. When she did abandon it, after that slight hesitation, she seemed to be all right. At the door she paused and looked back. “I’ll be at my desk,” she said. “I don’t need to lie down.” The comfortable detective sergeant merely nodded and smiled at that. After the girl had gone he turned to Dorian and said, “It was Dorian Hunt, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m—”

  “I know,” he said. “Met you once, but you wouldn’t remember it. A shindig.”

  She smiled, engagingly at a loss.

  “So many of you,” she said. “You know?”

  “And a good deal alike, really,” he said. “Same—what would you say—type?” He looked at her and smiled again. “You’re not, you know, Miss Hunt.” He nodded his head, approving his distinction. “So you’re an artist,” he said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of sorts,” she said. “Fashion drawings mostly. But some other things.”

  “For this magazine, Esprit?” he said.

  “I hope so,” she told him. “I don’t know if Mr. Wilming’s death ruins it.”

  He smiled suddenly, with amusement.

  “The damnedest things happen to you, too?” he said. “Like Mr. Stanton? He’s a character, that one.”

  An answer from her was not, she thought, indicated. Apparently she was right, because the detective sergeant seemed at that moment to turn over a new leaf.

  “By the way,” he said, “my name’s Flanagan. Detective Sergeant, Eighteenth Precinct. You didn’t know Mr. Wilming, you say?”

  She had met him only once, Dorian explained. He had telephoned her a week before and asked her to come in. He had said he liked some things of hers he had seen; he had wondered if she wanted to try something for Esprit. He’d bought an idea, he said, that he thought fitted her style.

  “Bought an idea?” Flanagan said.

  Dorian nodded. She explained. Most artists—cartoonists, if you wanted to call them that—had their own ideas. But many magazines also bought ideas, brief written descriptions of situations or characters which would make amusing drawings. Art editors passed these ideas along to certain artists as suggestions.

  “For instance,” she said, when Flanagan looked a little puzzled, “a contributor to Esprit was driving out in the country somewhere and he was stopped by a herd of cows, and the cows were being directed—herded, whatever you do to cows—by a very young, pretty girl, in shorts and halter that could have come from Saks, and she was riding on a high-wheeled tractor. Just sort of darting up and down the road on it, chasing cows. He thought there was a picture in it. So did Mr. Wilming. So he bought the idea and suggested it to an artist—me, as a matter of fact. And I’d come in to show him the result.”

  Flanagan said he saw.

  “So you only saw Wilming once, a week ago,” he said. “And today only the window he had jumped out of? Have I got it straight?”

  Dorian nodded.

  “Then you may as well keep your appointment,” Flanagan told her. “If anything else should come up—but it won’t, probably. The poor guy jumped.” He paused and looked at the window without seeming to see it. “I can never figure why people do things like this, can you?” he said. He seemed really to be puzzled. Dorian could not help him; she shook her head. There was a moment like a tiny vacuum and then she went. She found her way back along the corridor and came out in the reception room. Vilma St. John was back at her desk, talking to a man who stood in front of it, but she interrupted herself to call, “Oh, Miss Hunt.”

  Dorian turned back.

  “Mr. Helms wondered if you’d leave the drawing you brought to—to show Mr. Wilming,” she said, hesitating only momentarily. “I think they hope to use it in the next issue and now poor Mr. Helms is terribly rushed, of course. Would you? And tell me where he can get in touch with you in an hour or so, if he needs to.”

  Dorian took the drawing from her portfolio and laid it on the desk; she gave Miss St. John the telephone number of the restaurant where she was having lunch. She waited for the instant it took the girl to write it down. And as she waited, looking at nothing, she looked down into the wastebasket by the girl’s desk. There was something blue in it. The blue was reminiscent. Now Dorian really looked at a wilted blue cornflower lying on top of crumpled paper in the basket.

  “Thank you,” Vilma St. John said, looking up. “He’ll call you if there’s a change, or something. Otherwise he’ll write you.”

  Dorian nodded and went across the room and out of the office. So one tiny incident was rounded off. The St. John girl had seen a wilted cornflower lying on the floor by Mr. Wilming’s desk and had picked it up and thrown it away. It was natural; it was without importance. Almost certainly it was without importance; almost certainly Sergeant Flanagan would have dismissed it as without importance. Nevertheless, when she told Bill about it, she would mention the wilted little flower. She smiled to herself. It would show Bill how observant she could be, if it showed him nothing else.

  She looked at her watch and flagged a taxi-cab and gave the driver an address. And she found suddenly that she was glad to lean back even against the tattered cushions of this aged cab.

  Pamela North was sitting at the bar at Charles and talking to Gus. She twisted on the stool when Dorian came in and made small welcoming sounds and then broke them off.

  “Dor!” Pam North said, “What’s happened to you? You look as if you’d—I don’t know what.”

  “Saw something,” Dorian told her, and slid on
to the next bar stool and said, “Daiquiri please, Gus. A window a man had just jumped out of. A man who seemed pleasant and contented and who had a good job and, all at once, opened a window and jumped out of it. Just laid his cigarette down, walked to the window and jumped out. Just like that.”

  Dorian was surprised to find that she was shivering as she spoke; that when she lifted her glass her hand trembled a little.

  At one-thirty, a moment after they had slid behind the table Walter pulled out for them in the café, Hugo came looking, found them, said there was a telephone call for Miss Hunt. He hesitated momentarily over the name and looked at Dorian without complete assurance, but she nodded and smiled and went to the telephone behind the cashier’s desk.

  “Miss Hunt?” a woman’s voice said. “Just a moment, please. Mr. Helms is calling.”

  “Donald Helms, Miss Hunt,” an agreeable barytone voice said. “Hope I didn’t disturb your lunch?”

  “Not at all,” Dorian said. It sounded curt. “Of course not,” she said.

  “I just wanted to tell you that we all like the tractor girl tremendously,” he said. “Stanton—all of us. We’re using it at once.”

  Dorian said she was glad.

  “We hope you’ll do a lot for us now you’ve started,” Donald Helms told her. He seemed very cordial.

  “Oh, I hope so,” Dorian said. “I’d love to. And it was nice of you to let me know.”

  Helms made deprecating sounds; he said he hoped to meet her soon; he said, and sighed as he spoke, that the terrible thing about Wilming had jammed everything up.

  “It was terrible,” Dorian said.

  “You don’t know,” Helms said. “We can hardly believe it, you know. I still can’t believe it. Why, only half an hour before—” He stopped, letting it hang a moment. “But you didn’t know him, Miss Hunt,” he said. “I don’t mean to get you involved in all this. I just wanted to tell you we liked the girl on the tractor. Thanks for doing it.”

  Dorian turned away from the telephone a moment later, and there was a shine in her greenish eyes. It was fine—it was fun—to break into Esprit.

  A man at the bar turned to a man who had just joined him and said, “O.K.?” with a rising inflection. The other man nodded and finished his drink and the two went out. John and Gus looked at them and John shrugged.

  “Somebody said it takes all kinds to make a world,” John said. Gus shook his head. “Not here it doesn’t,” he said, and polished a glass, looking beyond it at the door the men were going through.

  They were very ordinary-looking men, in very ordinary-looking clothes. The man who had come in first—and almost on Dorian’s heels—was rather fat, a fat man in his middle thirties. His ears were faintly fuzzy, with a blond fuzz, and when he smiled, as he did now, he showed a broken tooth on the left side of his lower jaw. On the sidewalk he stopped to light a cigar, and the other man waited.

  “Quite a dame,” the man with the fuzz on his ears said. “Makes it more interesting.”

  The man to whom he spoke was shorter and darker, and not so fat. But he also looked like anybody. He pushed back the felt hat he wore and scratched his head briefly and pulled the hat down again. After this he said, “Yeah.” There was no particular comment in his tone.

  “Well,” Fuzzy Ears said, “there you are. You know where to call?”

  “Yeah,” the darker man said. “I know where to call.”

  The fatter man turned at that and walked, unhurrying, up the Avenue of the Americas toward Fourteenth Street. The other man went to a Pontiac coupe built in 1938, and slid behind the wheel. He lighted a cigarette and sat there, his head against the back of the seat, his hat pulled low over his eyes. He watched the entrance to Charles.

  At twenty minutes after two, Pamela North and Dorian Hunt came out of Charles’s. They stood for a moment talking on the sidewalk. Then Mrs. North, with a little farewell flick of her hand, walked away, going south toward Eighth Street. Dorian walked between two parked cars and stood in the street beyond them, and began to wave.

  The man in the Pontiac started his motor.

  A yellow taxicab swerved in toward Dorian and she got into it. It started uptown.

  The Pontiac pulled out from the curb a moment later and went uptown. At the first red light it pulled up alongside the yellow taxicab. But when the taxicab started up as the light changed, the Pontiac let it go ahead and fell in behind it.

  2

  FRIDAY

  2:45 P.M. TO 5:55 P.M.

  The taxicab driver had said nothing whatever between Charles Restaurant, on the Avenue of the Americas between Tenth and Eleventh, and the house on East Thirty-seventh Street. It had been an unsettling experience; an inexplicable failure of communication with the outside world. Even when Dorian paid the driver off he said only something which might have been, “Thanks, miss,” before he went away abruptly, as if he were engaged in a business operation. Dorian was smiling to herself when she went up the stairs to the front door and into the square marble-walled entryway. She looked in her box, bending to peer through the grating, and decided it was empty. She tucked her portfolio under her arm with her bag while she unlocked the door and went in.

  After not more than five minutes she came down again, now without the portfolio. She stood for a moment on the stoop, feeling the June sun. New York was bright that day and she felt suddenly a need to enjoy its brightness—the sharp outlines of its shadows, the kind of crispness it still retained, left over from the spring, containing no premonitory hint of the damp heat which within a month would make the very air seem to waver, as if there had been starch in it and the starch had been soaked away. Dorian went down the brown-stone stairs and turned right toward Madison Avenue. She would have time to walk; even if she were a little late she would take the time to walk. She wanted air and movement; she wanted to be distracted by living people from the memory of an open window.

  There were many cars in Thirty-seventh Street, moving west, and she did not notice that a Pontiac coupe turned out from the curb a moment after she had started and came along slowly behind a light delivery truck, making no effort to pass it. At Madison the truck was stopped by the light and the Pontiac stopped behind it; at Madison Dorian turned north, on the sunny side of the street. She walked with her head up and looked at the many living people. It was one of those days when she saw faces clearly—young faces and old faces; now and then, although not often enough, the face of someone who was not only living, but alive. After she had walked a block she began to feel good. She remembered the Esprit was buying the picture of the girl on the tractor and felt better.

  The swarthy man in the Pontiac had not counted on Dorian’s walking. It was a nuisance. In Madison Avenue he could not go slowly enough because the traffic was not going slowly enough. Between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth he had to pass Dorian and he swore, hugging the right-hand lane, looking for an opening. He was beyond Fortieth when he found one, signaled and turned into it. He twisted the ignition key in the lock, slid across the seat and came out on the sidewalk. Now, probably, she would pick up a cab; perhaps she had turned off Madison. He stood beside his car, facing the building in front of him, and looked down the street without appearing to do so. He did not see her for a moment. Then he saw her on the far side of Fortieth, waiting with several other people for the lights to change. He went across the sidewalk and looked into a window full of business machines. He continued to look into the window until Dorian Hunt had passed him, and then he shrugged, as if he had finally decided not to buy the enormous machine (whatever it was) he had been gazing at, and walked along up Madison like a man going nowhere.

  He kept close behind her. There was no real problem in following people on the street unless they knew they were being followed. You just sauntered along, keeping the quarry in sight, not trying to keep out of sight yourself. Nobody paid any attention. You could do it with half your mind, and the swarthy man did. The other half wondered what the hell he and Farno had got themselves into. He
didn’t care a great deal, if it was going to pay off, but he hoped they weren’t leading with their chins. Leading with his chin had cost Farno a good deal before now; he hoped Farno had learned his lesson. So far this looked all right and unless Farno was lying—always a possibility, of course—it was paying pretty well. Maybe it was paying too much? Well, for the time being anyhow, Farno could worry about that. He himself would just watch his step and play along, and trust nobody and get in no jam. He hoped. If he did he would have to get himself out of it, and would, and to hell with Farno.

  The girl crossed Madison at Forty-sixth Street and he thought for a moment she was going into the Ritz. That would complicate it. But she would undoubtedly finally go into something, and a hotel was easier than most places. A hotel was, as far as risk of discovery went, no worse than the street. But it was easier to lose your subject in a hotel.

  The girl went past the Ritz. She was easy to follow. There was something distinctive about the way she moved. She could walk, that dame. She didn’t sway back and forth the way a lot of dames did, but you noticed her just the same. It would be too bad if they had to get really tough with a dame like that; it would be a waste, sort of. But you couldn’t choose. If they had to, they had to.

  She turned west through Fifty-first and now she was hurrying up a little. He looked at his watch and saw it was a couple of minutes of three. He figured that she was planning to be somewhere at three o’clock, and had looked at her watch and decided to step along. She turned north on Fifth, still on the sunny side of the street, and really did step along.

  He kept close to her, knowing it was safe, and was not more than ten feet behind her when she turned into Bonwit-Teller’s. He swore to himself then. This made it hard. How the hell was a guy to look as if he had just walked in to that kind of store to pick up a package of cigarettes? How the hell was he to keep from sticking out among a bunch of women?

  Dorian looked at her watch when she got in the elevator and it was already ten minutes past three. Mabel would be annoyed; Mabel would have to hurry and she hated to hurry. If Mabel did not hurry, Mr. Henri would be annoyed, which was slightly more important. Obviously she had not really had time to walk. But she was glad she had; she felt somehow released. And she had seen enough faces—seen clearly enough faces—to fill her mind for days. For days she would be able to put faces down on paper, seeing how well she remembered; filling notebooks as well as her mind with knowledge of how faces were—what lines, what planes, what shadows made them as they were.