The Norths Meet Murder Read online

  “You can’t imagine how odd that sounds,” she said suddenly. “‘Jean and I’ from Hardie Saunders. As odd as that they should have been playing together—” She stopped and made a gesture of annoyance. “Although why they shouldn’t,” she said. “That I of all people should be starting gossip.” She looked at Weigand and smiled. “Forget it,” she said. “It was just that they used to be better friends than they are now and we were surprised when Jerry and Ben put them together, even if they do make a good team. But it worked out fine, didn’t it? You saw them play together and particularly at first—but you didn’t see them at first, did you?”

  Weigand said he hadn’t.

  “They were playing so beautifully together,” Helen said. “It was fun to watch them, even when they were losing the first set. And in the second—!”

  There seemed to be nothing much to say.

  “You know them well?” he asked.

  Helen said she did. She and Jean Corbin worked in the same advertising agency, Bell, Halpern & Bell. And Saunders had been an account executive there until about a year before, when he had left to start his own agency, taking the account with him.

  “Quench,” Helen said. “Awful stuff. You drink it. Anyway, lots of people drink it.”

  “And what did Bell, Halpern & Bell think of that?” Weigand said.

  They hadn’t, naturally, been much pleased, but it was all in the game. Jean Corbin, who had been Saunders’ assistant, became an account executive a month or two later, so it was all right with her. And Bell, Halpern & Bell weathered nicely.

  “And all this,” Helen said, “must bore you terribly. How did I get started?”

  It wasn’t clear to Weigand, who was watching Dorian Hunt’s small, animated face as she talked to Ben Fuller, sitting in a chair pulled up in front of her.

  “Is she—Miss Hunt—also with Bell and whatnot?” he said. Helen shook her head.

  “Fashion artist,” she said. “Free lance. And good; funny thin girls all her own.”

  People were, Weigand decided, coming to him as North had promised. For no good reason he checked them in his mind, recapitulating. Jane and Ben Fuller, whom he knew; Hardie Saunders, large and blond and sunburned, and proprietor of an advertising agency which advanced the claims of “Quench.” Helen Wilson, hearty and wholesome and something—a copywriter, he would guess—with Bell, Halpern & Bell. Jean Corbin, account executive with the same, and slight, dark, with a face of clear pallor and features carved impeccably by an artist. Bram Van Horst, who had flown airplanes and commanded men and done illustrations, and now was the squire of Lone Lake, and was Dutch and built dams. And the Norths, whom he had met under such unprepossessing circumstances, and got to know under such stress and whom he had come to know much better during the year—the year less a month or so—since he had encountered them, and been puzzled by them. A year since Mrs. North, going upstairs to an empty apartment above hers in Greenwich Place, had found the bathroom so unexpectedly and horribly occupied.*

  Then two things happened in quick succession. Fuller and Dorian Hunt were suddenly both looking at Weigand, Fuller grinning with the expression of light-hearted malice Weigand remembered from previous encounters. Dorian Hunt’s expression was different—withdrawn, considering.

  “I’ve been telling her about you, copper,” Fuller said. “She was asking.”

  “Oh,” said Weigand, flatly because Dorian Hunt’s face made him feel flat. “Right.”

  Then there was a peculiar cat sound at the door and Pete shouldered open the screen. He was staggering under the weight of a quarter-grown rabbit, clamped in his jaws. Over the rabbit, Pete’s eyes shone with pride. All the women gave small squeals of horror, but Dorian Hunt moved.

  She was across the room in an instant and had the surprised cat by the neck. With a kind of desperateness in her movements, she wrested the rabbit from Pete, who yowled in disapproval but was too polite to scratch. The rabbit was wide-eyed with terror, but still alive.

  “You—!” Dorian Hunt stormed at Pete. “You—hunter!”

  Pete, not used to humans who were other than friendly, backed away, one yellow eye wistfully on the rabbit which Dorian held to her, while little drops of blood dripped unnoticed on her bare arm. Then Dorian looked abashed and apologetic, and spoke more gently to Pete. She told Pete that it was his way, and that he was a cat and knew no better.

  “If only they wouldn’t hunt!” she said, turning to the others. “They’re so gracious and beautiful, but they hunt.” She stroked the rabbit. “It’s trembling,” she said. “It’s dreadful to be hunted.”

  Nobody said anything, because there seemed to be nothing to say. Then Mrs. North, deftly, broke the moment and turned it against Pete. She told Pete he was a bad cat, a dreadful cat, and pushed him out the door. He went, looking back at the rabbit. Mr. North took the rabbit from Dorian and said he would see it safe and was gone a little while and came back without rabbit and with reassurance. They brought Pete in, then, and shut the door so he would forget and he went to rub against Dorian’s bare legs, forgivingly. After a moment, she stroked him and repeated, to him and the company at large, that of course he didn’t know any better.

  But she did not, from then until the time she and Helen, and the Fullers and Saunders with them, left the Norths’ cabin, look directly at Lieutenant William Weigand, acting captain in the Homicide Bureau of the New York Police Department. It was pretty clear, Weigand thought—and was depressed unexpectedly by the thought—that she didn’t like detectives. She felt more strongly about them, he suspected, than a charming young woman in her middle twenties ought to have any reason to feel.

  * The circumstances of Mrs. North’s discovery are described in “The Norths Meet Murder.”

  3

  SATURDAY

  6:30 P.M. TO SUNDAY, 1:25 A.M.

  Lieutenant Weigand believed that a detective needed luck, and that a lucky detective was given hunches. He thought, afterward, that a particularly lucky detective would have had a hunch during the Fullers’ party; would have felt in the air something of what was coming, as the thunder of a summer storm announces what is to come, making ashtrays tremble metallically and sending vibrations tingling through glass. But Weigand was not that lucky, and no hunch troubled him all the evening. And since no hunch told him that he should, he paid no more than any man’s attention to what went on.

  It was a casual party. The Norths led him to it along a path through the sumach, reddening for autumn, a little after nine, and already it was dark. They had had another drink after the rest left, and a steak and an hour or so of sitting while the setting sun did things to clouds which made Mrs. North say “Oh,” and then while it grew dark, with the air of having all the time in the world to grow dark. They talked lazily, and the Norths gossiped a little. What Helen Wilson had meant about Jean Corbin and Hardie Saunders was that they had once been, everybody believed, in love, but that it had broken off after Saunders left the advertising agency.

  “Jean gets around,” Mrs. North said, with tolerance. “Now it’s Johnny Blair, from ’way down south in Dixie. Which made Thelma very annoyed.”

  Weigand tried to remember.

  “Thelma?” he said. “Which one was Thelma?”

  “Pale,” Mrs. North said. “No-colored, stringy hair. She was at the court. Sort of forgettable face and always looks unhappy, sort of.”

  “Oh, yes,” Weigand said. “What annoyed her?”

  “She thought she was going to be Cinderella again,” Mrs. North said. “You’d be sorry if she’d let you like her. But there wasn’t any prince.”

  Weigand looked at Mr. North, who shook his head and said he’d tell it, since it had been brought up.

  “Thelma shared a cabin with Jean last year,” he said. “And the year before. They used to be great friends, although I always thought Jean had Thelma around—well, for whatever reason it is that attractive women sometimes like to have unattractive ones around.” He held up a restraining hand tow
ard Mrs. North, who seemed inclined to yip. “I said sometimes,” he said. “Not you, wiggles.”

  “And don’t call me ‘wiggles’!” Mrs. North said.

  Mr. North captured the hand which was beating his arm, and continued.

  “Then, toward the end of last season, Blair turned up and was over at the Jean-Thelma cabin a good deal. He lives with Saunders, and Saunders introduced him. And Thelma seems to have been a little confused for a while as to his purposes. Then Jean and Blair, between them, unconfused her. And Jean and Thelma stopped sharing a cabin. Clear?”

  “Well—” said Weigand, speculatively. “She’s still here, though. Thelma, I mean.”

  “She’s just up for the party tonight,” North said. “She’s staying overnight at the Wilsons’, or somewhere. Jane Fuller thought it would be nice to invite her.”

  “But you’re not telling him about James Harlan Abel,” Mrs. North objected. “Our only professor. And Jean after him.”

  “Look,” North said, “I don’t see how we got into this. Does Bill have to know about all these people?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. North. “It’s fascinating. Like a comedy or something.”

  “Well,” North said, and hesitated. “We think that now Jean is getting a little fed up with Johnny Blair and would like to go over to Abel. Abel’s tall, stooped, and young-looking in an old way—you met him. He’s at Columbia. English. He’s new this year, and Jean apparently likes him. Or just likes his being new. Anyway, the sewing circle is mighty suspicious about it, and is very sorry for Mrs. Abel, who is old-looking in a young sort of way. She’s the one with faintly red hair. Very thin and nervous. She rides herd on James Harlan, rather, and our Jeanie had better look out.”

  Mr. North paused a moment.

  “And now,” he said, “shall we tell you how Van Horst beats his wife?”

  “Jerry!” said Mrs. North, indignantly. “You’re making fun!”

  Mr. North was very grave.

  “We think you should know all,” he assured Weigand. “This is a very desperate place, full of currents. We’re just waiting until Van Horst gets married.”

  Mrs. North got her hand loose and resumed pounding her husband’s arm, with an indignation which was not supposed to convince.

  That had all been just before they went along the path through the sumach to the party at the Fullers’. The Fuller cabin was very like the Norths’, only rather larger, as it shortly needed to be. It was a casual but crowded party; Weigand met all the people he had met before or heard talked about, and a good many others and after a few drinks he found a place to sit in a corner and the party became a pleasant blur. He hoped Dorian Hunt would sit by him when there was a place vacant, but she didn’t. A few times he danced with Pam North and Jane Fuller, when there was dancing, and Saunders sat beside him for a few minutes, looking damply hot and jovial, and Helen Wilson said that she didn’t want to dance, but that a drink and a place to sit would save her life. So for a time after he had got her a fresh drink she sat beside Weigand, companionably but without saying much.

  People went in and out of the cabin on excursions and for purposes of their own. Weigand went out once and found that white mist was rising from the lake and that an almost full moon had come up and was shining on it and as he turned back into the house he met Hardie Saunders coming out, mopping his forehead and talking about air. Helen Wilson was gone from her place on the sofa when he got back, but after a little he saw her dancing. Both the Norths were gone, then, and so was Jean Corbin, who had been talking quickly, containedly, to a thin, oldish-young man who must be James Harlan Abel. But Mrs. Abel seemed nowhere in sight to ride herd. Then the Norths came back, apparently having been somewhere in a car, the lights of which swept the lawn outside the cabin and went out just before they came in. Van Horst was with them and with Van Horst was a guitar, and then he sang Scottish and Irish songs, and one or two songs of surprising bawdiness.

  It was then and afterward that a hunch would have been helpful, but Weigand had no hunch. So he paid only the attention that a man comfortably looking on at a party, a reasonable part of the time through the bottom of a glass, might be expected to pay. He had, when he tried to work things out afterward, a belief that most of the people he knew at the party had been grouped around, on chairs and sofas and the floor, when Van Horst was singing. But he had no definite guess to make as to what time that was. And as, afterward, the party scattered from the nucleus of the music, and took on a more rapid tempo, he made no effort to follow the movements of the various Lone Lakers. Dorian Hunt was, he was pretty sure, out of the cabin only once or twice, and then briefly, and he was surprised, when it came time to remember what he could, how sharply he remembered her—now dancing with the grace he had expected; now standing and talking, and managing to carry that rather singular, balanced grace even into relative immobility. Her smile recognized him once or twice, but when he tried to get her to dance she had already moved into the arms of someone else.

  It was, he knew, very near the end of the party when Jean Corbin ended a dance near where he was sitting, and sat down beside him and said:

  “They say you are a detective.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “I’m trying,” he said, “to be on vacation, though.” He patted his pockets. “No handcuffs,” he added. “No gun.” The gun was back at the Norths’, locked in a bag, and he had no handcuffs. There was a badge in his pocket, however.

  “It must be interesting,” Jean Corbin said. “Thinking ahead of people. Outwitting them. Letting them think they are too clever and then—snap!”

  Weigand smiled and said it seldom worked out that way. Usually, he said, it was a question of getting hold of somebody who knew something, and getting him to tell what he knew. A stool-pigeon; a man who might be expected to grow talkative if he had to go too long without narcotics; a man who stayed unmolested on sufferance, and the promise of a willing tongue. Those things, and what one came to know of certain patterns of criminal behavior.

  “I don’t mean professional criminals,” the slim, dark girl with the sharply cut face assured him. “I mean—oh, murderers who haven’t police records or anything, and kill—what shall I say?—privately, for private ends.”

  Weigand nodded, and said he assumed she did. Most people thought of crime like that, he said. But most crime was professional and its detection took a memory for faces and for facts, and a knowledge of who, among all the talkers the department knew of, might be the man to talk to the point. That and organization, and having plenty of men to cover the ground.

  “It’s seldom the detective’s wits against those of the gentlemanly murderer,” he said. “Too bad, isn’t it?”

  “But sometimes—?” she insisted.

  Weigand said of course, sometimes. And that then it was usually a lot of work, with no assurance of success.

  “Murder is seldom ingenious, outside books,” he said. “And when it is, it is often successfully hidden.” He grinned at her. “Only don’t try it,” he added. “Sometimes we do catch on, and you might be unlucky.”

  She shook her head and said she wouldn’t.

  “Not even Hardie, the lummox,” she said. “Although when he let that one get by this afternoon I could have—”

  Saunders’ ears apparently caught their owner’s name, to which ears are always so marvelously attuned. At any rate, he came over and stood in front, and beamed down.

  “What’s this I hear?” he demanded. “What’s this?”

  “I was telling him I thought I was going to have to kill you because of this afternoon,” Jean explained. “But he talked me out of it. You owe him your life.”

  “Good,” Saunders said. “Thanks, old man. Keep an eye on her, will you? They say you’re a cop.”

  He seemed pleasantly drunk and amiable.

  Jean looked at the watch on her wrist, and said suddenly that she thought she would go. It was after one, she said, impossible as it sounded. The party seemed unabated but, a
s Weigand looked it over, it was appreciably thinned out. Dorian had gone, for one, and apparently Helen Wilson with her; the discontented face of Thelma Smith also had vanished. The Abels, together now, and the Norths, also together, were talking and Mrs. North caught Weigand’s eye and her eyebrows indicated Jean and went up. Both Fullers were mixing drinks and somebody was urging Van Horst to play again. Jean got up and drew a light coat around her.

  “Is your cabin near?” Weigand asked. “Should I walk along with you?”

  She smiled and said it would be nice, if he wanted to. They walked through a mist that was creeping higher from the lake and now dulled Weigand’s flashlight as they went along a path which seemed to circle the lake. The path dipped toward the lake, and another joined it from the right and the sumach was still growing closely. Then Jean turned up, away from the water, and the moonlight outlined another cabin, rather smaller than the others. They stepped in and Jean said to wait a moment while she got a light. A match flared and she lighted lamps. Then she said “brrr!

  “It’s cold in here,” she said. “The fire’s—well, that’s odd. It isn’t quite out, is it? It’s smoldered along since this morning, evidently.”

  Bill Weigand crossed to the fireplace.

  “It needs stirring,” he said, and stirred it resolutely. A flame shot up.

  “It needs more wood,” Weigand said. “If you’ll tell me where—?”

  “In the still-room,” she said. “Through that door.”

  The Corbin cabin differed from the others Weigand had seen. It was considerably smaller, in its central mass. But a one-room wing had been built beyond the kitchen; built solidly, with a concrete floor. There was wood piled in it, and a few garden tools and a two-gallon can for kerosene. Weigand picked up an armful of wood, went back, built up the fire and said:

  “Still-room?”

  Jean was sitting on a bench in front of the fire, huddling toward it. She held out her hands to the flame as she explained.