Murder Out of Turn Page 23
Everybody waited, anxiously. Including Pam. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t.” She looked at the others a little defensively. “I’m just not any good at dates,” she said. “I mean—dates that are now. I was very good in history, though.”
She looked at all of them, and said she was sorry.
“It doesn’t really matter,” she said. “I didn’t mean to bring it up and worry everybody. I just wondered and—mentioned it. But there’s no use trying to find out, because I’m just no good at dates.” She paused and looked at Jerry. “I’ll tell you, Jerry,” she said. “I don’t even remember the date we were married.”
Mr. North started to tell her, but she broke through.
“Only the day of the month,” she said. “I remember that. It was March 4.”
Dorian and Bill Weigand looked at Mr. North, who nodded.
“It was, for a wonder,” he said. He looked at his wife curiously.
“How do you come to remember that, Pam?” he asked.
“Because it’s election day, of course,” Mrs. North said.
They were still looking at her, in pleased astonishment, when the telephone rang. Mr. North was the nearer and scooped it up. He greeted it and said “yes” and, after a moment, “yes” again. Then he said “of course” and handed the telephone to Weigand. Weigand said “right” and listened. Knowing him as the others did, they could see him stiffen as he listened, and Dorian Hunt, whose gray-green eyes smiled as if by themselves when they looked at Weigand, said, “Oh, dear!” softly. After what seemed a rather long time, Bill Weigand said “right” again and put the telephone back in its cradle.
Weigand sat a moment, looking at the others, and then he smiled. It was rather a detached smile, as if its sponsor was thinking of other things.
“Trouble,” he said. “And the police called in. So—I hate to break things up, Pam.”
“Murder?” she said.
Weigand looked at her a moment.
“Well,” he said, “it might be. That’s where I come in, of course. Up on the Ritz-Plaza roof, a young woman.” He looked from Pam to Dorian, thinking aloud. “It’s an odd thing, apparently,” he said. “She seems to have had too much to drink, and passed out. Only when she passed out, she was dead—just like that. Which worried the hotel doctor. And the ambulance surgeon, when he came. And that worried the precinct. Therefore—”
“Oh,” Mrs. North said. “A young woman? Dancing?”
“I don’t know, Pam,” Weigand said. “She could dance there, couldn’t she? They didn’t say.”
“It seems to—” Mrs. North said. She broke off for a moment. “Well,” she said, “it won’t be anybody we know, anyway. Not this time.”
Weigand smiled.
“No,” he said, “you and Jerry have had a bit more than your share. This isn’t one that will bother you; no detecting for the Norths this time. We’ll just find out who killed Miss Winston and let you know.”
He stopped, partly because Mrs. North was staring at him.
“Winston!” she repeated. “Now, listen, Bill—not Lois Winston?”
The other three looked at her, but this time differently.
“Now don’t tell me—” Weigand began. Mrs. North held up a hand.
“Was it a Lois Winston?” she demanded. They looked at Bill Weigand, who nodded slowly.
“Right,” he said. “Lois Winston. Lives off Park Avenue somewhere. Money. Social Register. That’s why the precinct—”
“Then,” Mrs. North said, with a kind of detached resignation, “I do know her. Or know of her, anyway. She works for the Foundation.”
“Works?” Weigand repeated. “She didn’t sound like it. She sounded like money, and all that.”
Mrs. North nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “That part’s all right. But just the same, she worked for the Foundation. A volunteer, I think—anyway, she—”
Weigand broke in.
“I’ve got to get along,” he said. “But perhaps I’d better hear this. Do you want to ride up with me, Pam, and tell me the rest of it as we go?”
“Well—” Pam said, doubtfully—“I—oh, all right, Bill. Only I don’t like it. Remember about Jerry’s arm. And about my neck.” She looked at him, rather darkly. “Remember, Bill?” she said. Bill nodded.
“Bring Jerry to look after you,” he said. “Only you’re not going to get into this one—nor is Jerry, nor are you, Dorian. It’s just a chance to pick up some information without wasting time. Come on.”
“All of us?” Dorian asked.
“Why not?” Weigand wanted to know. “I won’t make you into a policewoman, Dor. Except maybe by—”
“All right, Bill,” Dorian said. “Hold it, Loot.”
“And,” Mrs. North said, “remember how Dorian got almost—”
“Yes, Pam,” Bill said. “I’m not forgetting. We’ll be very careful of all of you. Are you coming?”
They went, of course. Weigand’s Buick, with red lights blinking in front and with the siren speaking low at crossings, went north. Pam sat beside the driver, now very officially Lieutenant William Weigand, acting captain in the Homicide Bureau of the New York Police Department. It was also a somewhat different Mrs. North. Not for the first time, Weigand noted with underlying surprise how quickly cogent she could be when she wished.
She knew little about Lois Winston at first hand, it developed. She thought she had seen her once in the offices of the Foundation—the Placement Foundation, in West Twenty-ninth Street. “I’m on the committee,” she said. “Names. Sometimes benefits. That sort of thing. Jerry sends a check now and then, too.” In addition, Pam North was interested in the work itself. “They place children for adoption,” she said. “Orphans, foundlings, children whose parents can’t care for them and ask help—that sort of thing.” As a result of her interest, she had got to know Mary Crane, who was the secretary.
“She’s a professional,” Pam explained. “Only don’t think of social workers in tweed skirts and flat-heeled shoes, looking under the beds for dirt. This place isn’t like that. And Mary Crane isn’t.”
“I know,” Weigand said. “I’ve met them around. Go on.”
Pam, she told him, had once thought of doing volunteer work herself, but abandoned the idea because—“Oh,” she said, “because of a lot of things. They don’t matter.” She had asked Mary Crane about it and Miss Crane had been encouraging. They did, she had told Pam, now and then use volunteers; in rare instances, if the volunteers were exceptional and were willing to keep on through a long training period, and sometimes study in addition at the New York School of Social Work, they used volunteers for investigations and in other responsible capacities. Then Miss Crane had cited Lois Winston as an example—a girl who had been with them five years, who worked merely because she wanted to do something which would help people, who took the hours and the tasks of the professional workers but not the salary; who took, also, the routine and the supervision and the exacting personal responsibility which went with the job.
“She thinks—thought—a lot of Lois Winston,” Mrs. North said. “You could tell by the way she spoke of her. Although it had raised problems, of course.”
“What problems?” Weigand said, letting the siren snarl warning at a car which had injudiciously poked its nose from a side street. The nose withdrew precipitately.
“Well,” Pam explained, “to most of the workers it’s a job, of course. They are professionals—in that profession, usually, because they want to do something useful, but making their livings by it all the same. And when a volunteer comes in, they are inclined to resent it. Although, Miss Crane says, it merely means one more worker, usually; it doesn’t put anybody out of a job.”
“Then why—?” Weigand said.
Pam North said she didn’t know, in detail. Naturally, Miss Crane had not told her in detail. She had merely let something drop. Pam added that there might, of course, be nothing t
o it; that, almost surely, there was nothing to it.
“I merely gathered,” she said, “that about the time Lois Winston went on the staff—got to be a regular worker, that is—they had had to let a professional worker go. For some other reason. But apparently the girl they fired didn’t believe what they said, and thought that Miss Winston had—well, done her out of a job.”
“Well—” Weigand said, doubtfully.
“It’s possible,” Pam pointed out, “that I’ve—oh, built all this up; made a story out of it—out of something Miss Crane let drop. I do, you know.”
She said it without apology, and not defensively. It was merely one of the things Pam North knew about Pam North, and expected others to know. Weigand nodded.
“It would have been five years ago, anyway,” he said.
In the next block, outside the Ritz-Plaza, green and white patrol cars nudged against the curb. He swung the Buick in among them. Weigand got out, and the others, a little doubtfully, got out behind him. Weigand looked as if he didn’t know what to do with them.
“Go ahead,” Mr. North told him: “Forget us, if Pam’s told you what you want to know. We may come up, though, and have a drink and look on. Now that we’re here.”
“Oh,” said Pam. “Yes. On the murder roof.”
The Norths looked at Dorian.
“The three of you,” Dorian said, a little helplessly. Weigand looked at her, because it was fun to look at her. Even as she stood, not moving, she had that singular, poised grace which he had first noticed the autumn before when there was murder at Lone Lake and Dorian was in the thick of it, and he had abandoned a firm determination to continue a vacation. Weigand found, against all professional reasoning, that he hoped she would go with the Norths to the roof. He might get to see her again, for one thing. There really is a glint of red in her hair, Weigand decided, realizing that he should be thinking of Lois Winston.
“Oh, all right,” he heard Dorian say, and there was a warm center of contentment inside Lieutenant Weigand, somewhere as he crossed the sidewalk to the lobby. It persisted across the lobby and to the express elevator, marked “Roof Only,” at the end of a bank of elevators. A uniformed policeman was standing there, as if by accident. He saluted when Weigand came up and pressed a signal button. Weigand disappeared upward as the Norths and Dorian Hunt crossed the lobby. The policeman looked at them doubtfully. But he made no move to stop Mr. North when he, in turn, pressed the signal button. He merely looked at them curiously when the three entered the express elevator and followed Weigand toward what Mrs. North called, and what she said the newspapers would call in the morning, “the murder roof.” (The newspapers, as it turned out, were more considerate of the Ritz-Plaza. They merely called it the murder at the Club Plaza, which was obviously more polite.)
Buy A Pinch of Poison Now!
About the Authors
Frances and Richard Lockridge were some of the most popular names in mystery during the forties and fifties. Having written numerous novels and stories, the husband-and-wife team was most famous for their Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries. What started in 1936 as a series of stories written for the New Yorker turned into twenty-six novels, including adaptions for Broadway, film, television, and radio. The Lockridges continued writing together until Frances’s death in 1963, after which Richard discontinued the Mr. and Mrs. North series and wrote other works until his own death in 1982.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1940, 1941 by Frances and Richard Lockridge
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3112-7
This edition published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
THE MR. AND MRS. NORTH MYSTERIES
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
These and more available wherever ebooks are sold
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.
The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.
58 Warren Street
info@mysteriousbookshop.com
(212) 587-1011
Monday through Saturday
11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
FIND OUT MORE AT:
www.mysteriousbookshop.com
FOLLOW US:
@TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia