The Dishonest Murderer Page 25

  “Approximately,” Jerry North said. “Opens off Christopher, or maybe Greenwich. No—wait. Isn’t it that funny little street over by Commerce?”

  “That’s Gay Street,” Pam said.

  But Jerry shook his head, because he was sure—almost sure—that Gay was the one off Christopher.

  “Anyway,” Pam said, deciding it for them, “we won’t find it here, and Bill doesn’t want to leave because he’s waiting for somebody, so come on.”

  They went. It was not the one off Greenwich. It was not—they were in a cab by this time—the one off Commerce. For a time it looked as if it were not off anything, but then another cab driver—a very old and somewhat battered cab driver—directed theirs.

  But there was no getting into West Kepp Street in the cab, even after they had found it. The cab, which had started to enter the street, confronted a policeman and stopped abruptly. The driver knocked his flag up, turned, and looked back at the Norths. “Looks like something’s going on in here,” he told them.

  It did. One sidewalk of West Kepp Street was almost filled with people, all looking in the same direction, looking across the narrow street. There were uniformed patrolmen in the middle of the street, and at both ends; along the curb opposite the people there were more cars than West Kepp could hold. Several of them were partly on the sidewalk. Small boys darted from the walk on which so many people stood, moved restlessly, and made for the cars, and policemen said, “Now, get back there. Get back there!” The little boys got back, but did not stay back; the sight of so many police cars was irresistible. Privileged, on the same side of the street as the center of interest, but not wandering, standing in a restless group, were several men with press cards in the bands of their hats.

  “Can’t come in here ’less you live here,” the patrolman who had stopped their cab said to the Norths, leaning in a window to look at them. “You live here?”

  “Not exactly,” Pam North said, before Jerry could speak.

  “Then you’ll have to move along, lady,” the patrolman said. “Can’t come in here ’less you live here.” He looked at Pam, and was moved to further speech. “Been trouble here,” he said.

  “Look,” Jerry said, and reached for the door handle on the side opposite the policeman. “We—”

  “Lieutenant Weigand,” Pam North said, at the same time, but more rapidly. “Sergeant Mullins. Inspector O’Malley.”

  “Listen, lady,” the patrolman said. “I don’t care who—”

  “Look, officer,” Jerry said, and closed his free hand firmly on Pam North’s wrist, “Lieutenant Weigand called us and asked us to come over. My name’s North. Suppose you—”

  “There he is!” Pam said. “Mullins!”

  Everybody, Jerry thought—all the people on the sidewalk, all the men with press cards—looked at the cab from which Pam North’s clear, bright voice emerged.

  “Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. But then he too saw Mullins, large, reassuring, coming down the sidewalk toward them. The patrolman stepped back from the cab window and looked around the cab at Mullins. Now, everybody looked at Mullins. Anything that made a sound, anything that moved, was good enough.

  “Mr. and Mrs. North,” Mullins said, when he was close enough. “O.K.,” he said to the patrolman, “the Loot says it’s all right. He wants to see them.”

  There was the faintest possible emphasis on the word “he.”

  “Really, Mullins,” Pam said, as they got out, as she waited for Jerry to pay the cab driver, “you’re so disassociative.”

  “What?” Mullins said.

  “Never mind,” Pam said. “But remember, we were asked.”

  “It’s only when I think of the inspector,” Mullins said. “You know how he acts, Mrs. North.” The three of them began to walk through West Kepp Street. “And it’s already a screwy one,” Mullins said. “As soon as I saw the set-up, I says to myself, it’s a screwy one, so—” He broke off.

  “So the Norths will be in it,” Jerry said. “I know what you said.”

  “Look, Mr. North,” Mullins said, earnestly, as they went down three steps to a shop door, as now, everybody looked at them, as there was a kind of expectant murmur from the crowd. “Look, it’s just that the inspector—”

  “You know,” Pam said, more or less to Jerry, “they all think we’ve been arrested. That we’re being taken in to see—to see—”

  But then the realization of what they probably were being taken in to see overcame Pam North, and the excitement died in her voice. “Oh,” she said, and went ahead of the two men into the shop and, as she entered it, looked around anxiously. Lieutenant William Weigand detached himself from a little group midway down the shop’s length and came toward them, saying “hello,” saying he was sorry to have dragged them out. Then he looked at Pam’s face and smiled faintly and shook his head.

  “It’s been taken away, Pam,” he said. “Don’t look so—frightened. All that part of it’s over. It’s something else I want you to see. And probably—” He shrugged. “I’m playing a hunch.”

  He started back toward the rear of the shop, and the Norths went with him.

  “You see,” Bill Weigand told them, over his shoulder, “we got an anonymous squeal; one of those telephone things. ‘I want a policeman. I want to report a murder.’ That sort of thing.”

  He opened a door in the rear of the shop and motioned them into a smaller room, obviously a room in which somebody had lived—had slept, had eaten, had sat in a worn, deep old chair, to read by the light from a cheap bridge lamp.

  “When the boys got here there was nobody,” he said. “The door was locked. Question whether they should have come in at all, but they did. Nobody here—except dogs and cats and a man named Halder. He was dead; been dead for hours. Crammed in one of the pens. Led Mullins to decide it was a screwy one; that the Norths would be in it. Well—then we found this.”

  He picked up from the bed a loosely wrapped package, shucked off brown paper. And Pam North, faintly, gasped. Bill looked at her briefly and turned the blank first sheet of a drawing pad. He showed them the second sheet.

  “I thought I recognized some friends,” Bill Weigand said. From half the page, enormous round eyes looked out of a dark, suspicious, furry face. From the other half, a hind leg waved in air, as a cat contorted for ablutions. Bill flicked the page over. There were more cats. “Right?” Bill Weigand said.

  Pam nodded slowly. “I guess Mullins was,” she said. “Yes.” She turned to Jerry. “Anyway, they’re good, aren’t they?” she asked. “What you wanted?”

  Jerry took the pad from Bill Weigand and leafed through it. Then he nodded.

  “She’ll do,” he said. “If—” He looked at Bill. “If she’s available,” he said.

  Bill Weigand only shrugged.

  Brian had called at a few minutes after six.

  He had spoken rapidly, strain evident in his voice. For a moment, when she answered, the strain apparent when he spoke first in greeting seemed to lessen, then at once it returned. He had called, he said, to see if she got home all right; to tell her that he could not, as he had hoped, come around. “To explain this mess,” he said. He had notified the police. “I didn’t identify myself,” he said. “I—I haven’t time now to answer a lot of questions. I’ve got to get things straightened out.”

  “Brian!” she had said. “You’ve got to tell me what all this is.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I don’t know myself. I’ve got to see—someone. So far I haven’t. Anyway, you’re out of it.”

  “Darling!” she said. “Listen to me! I wasn’t in it. I—I just happened to go there.”

  “Of course,” he said. “All the same—”

  “And anyway—” she began.

  “Liza!” he said. “Please, dear!” His voice was roughened, almost impatient. “I’ll call back as soon as I can.” Then his voice, she thought by an effort, became softer, more his voice. “Wait for me, dear,” he said. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing to do
with you.”

  And then, while she was still saying, “All right,” there had come the click as he cut the connection.

  It would have been better if he had not called at all; better for her nerves, less rasping in her mind. He was strange, not Brian at all; what he said was incomprehensible; his whole attitude told her that, beyond even his father’s death, there was some strange thing, some enormity, of which he was a part and from which he was trying to shield her. She did not know, could not tell from anything he had said or done, whether he even felt grief at his father’s death; he was excited, upset; it was as if the old man’s death were not an ending, but the beginning of something more complex, more threatening. But they did not even know how the old man had come to die. Then Liza O’Brien thought: I mean I don’t know; that’s all I mean. I don’t know what Brian knows or doesn’t know.

  It was a little before seven when someone knocked on the apartment door. She went quickly; although it was not Brian’s usual knock, it might still be Brian on this evening when nothing was as usual, nothing serene and accustomed. But it was not Brian. It was a man almost as tall, a man with a dark, sensitive face. She put her hand up to her mouth, the knuckles against her lower lip and did so instinctively and, dimly, was aware of surprise at her own action.

  “Miss O’Brien?” the man said. His voice was courteous, without emphasis. “I’m Detective Sergeant Stein. Lieutenant Weigand would like to see you, if you don’t mind.”

  “Weigand,” she said. “Why that’s—” She broke off.

  “He’s a Homicide man, Miss O’Brien,” Sergeant Stein said. “Just a couple of questions he wants to ask you.” He looked down at her. “About West Kepp Street,” he said. “Do you want to get a hat, or something, Miss O’Brien?”

  She got a light coat while he waited. She went with him in the elevator to the street level, walked with him across the sidewalk to a car parked in front of the building. They might have been a young man and a girl going out to dinner, going to the theater, going somewhere to dance. He opened a front door for her, closed it after her, went around the car and got in beside her, under the wheel. From the building, which was in the Murray Hill district, they went east, then up First Avenue.

  The car, after slowing while Sergeant Stein peered out for street numbers, stopped in Sutton Place, in front of one in a row of houses which, Liza remembered, had rear gardens, rear windows, from which one could see the East River. The house in front of which they stopped was larger than most of them; several other cars were parked nearby, as if their occupants also were in the house.

  “Guess this is it,” Stein said. He paused after she had joined him on the sidewalk and looked up at the house. “Quite a place,” he said. “Come on, Miss O’Brien.”

  “But you said—” she began.

  He looked down at her, and his face was, momentarily, friendly.

  “The lieutenant’s inside,” he said. “Talking to some other people.” He took a police badge from his pocket and showed it to her. “See?” he said. “It’s all right.” Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “But you should have asked sooner, Miss O’Brien. You shouldn’t be so trusting.”

  Then they went up to the door of the house, which opened at once, as if someone had been expecting them, had seen the car stop. The man who opened the door was a large man, with a broad, weathered face and, rather unexpectedly, gentle brown eyes.

  “Miss O’Brien,” Stein said. “O.K., Al?”

  “Go on in,” the big man said. “Take her right along. We’re getting quite a crowd.” He paused. “And the Norths,” Sergeant Aloysius Mullins added, more or less to himself.

  There was an entrance hall, and, beside it, a small room which, as Liza glimpsed it through the open door, seemed to be lined with books. Two steps up from the little foyer brought them into a very long, rather narrow room which seemed to run the full length of the house, to tall windows looking out on the garden in the rear. Near the right wall, as Liza looked toward the windows, a spiral staircase led up. And Pamela North came up the room toward them, walking quickly.

  “I’m sorry,” Pam said. “Bill knew the cats. There wasn’t anything I could do. Why did you leave it?”

  The drawing pad! That was it.

  “I—I just forgot,” Liza O’Brien said. “I was—scared, I guess.”

  She looked at Pam, who smiled at her, and suddenly, for no reason at all, except the friendliness, the interest, in a small, expressive face, Liza felt better. Then she looked beyond Pam North at a man of a little over middle height who was moving toward them, and moving rapidly although he did not seem to hurry.

  “Pam,” the man said. “Wait a minute.” Then he spoke to Liza, saying, “You’re Miss O’Brien?” She nodded. “My name’s Weigand,” the man said.

  “I know,” Liza said. “You’re Dorian’s husband.”

  He looked at her quickly, doubtfully; she felt she had said the wrong thing. But he said, “Yes, Miss O’Brien,” his tone noncommittal.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—to—”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I’m sorry to have to bring you up here, Miss O’Brien. But you couldn’t just walk out, you know. Walk out, then telephone the police and report. What made you think you could?”

  “After all,” Pam North said, “she forgot she’d forgotten. The drawings, I mean. Otherwise she could have. Probably she was just frightened.”

  Bill looked at Pam North for a moment; he checked the movement of his right hand toward his hair. All the men in Pam North’s life, he thought momentarily, distractingly, acquired disarranged hair. It was also evident that Miss Liza O’Brien, little and pretty and with the freshness of a young animal just beginning, had acquired a partisan. As quickly as that, perhaps merely by looking like that.

  “Let Miss O’Brien answer, Pamela,” Bill Weigand said, mildly. He turned back to the girl. “You did find Mr. Halder’s body, down at the pet shop?”

  For a moment she hesitated. But it was no good, now; whatever Brian planned was no good now.

  She nodded.

  “Tell me,” he said. “No, wait. We don’t have to stand here.”

  He turned away and looked down the room. Liza had been conscious that there were other people in the room, clustered at the far end of the room, near the tall windows. Now she looked at them. There were two men and two women, and, sitting detached from them, a third man. One of the women was full-bodied, with white hair piled high, very recently piled high by expert fingers. The other woman was younger; if the large woman was in her late forties, the slighter one, the blond one, was about thirty-five. The two men were nearer an age, roughly, like the older woman, in their middle or late forties. One of them was heavily built, wore a double-breasted suit with squared shoulders, stood solidly erect. The other was tall—why, Liza thought, he’s as tall as Brian. Then she realized that she had thought this because, elusively, he looked like Brian Halder. Then it must be—

  “Oh, Colonel,” Weigand said, and the heavily built man turned from the window and gave attention. Then he walked toward them, his face full of gravity. The third man, as if this were a signal, stood up in front of the chair in which he had been sitting. Liza recognized him; he was Mr. Gerald North, to whom she was going to show her sketches of cats.

  “This is Lieutenant Colonel Whiteside, Miss O’Brien,” Weigand said. The lieutenant colonel nodded gravely. “I have a few questions to ask her before we go on. I wonder if—”

  “The library, by all means,” Whiteside said. He nodded toward the small room off the foyer. “Have you—?” His voice was anxious. Bill Weigand shook his head, absently. “I haven’t heard anything as yet,” he said. “Miss O’Brien?”

  They went to the small room. She preceded him into it; then he hesitated, looked back. “Pam,” he said. “You and Jerry. Will you come in for a minute or two?” The Norths came. The room was comfortable for four; it would hardly have been for six. The books, Liza thought—and was puzzled tha
t her mind was now, of all times, capable of the irrelevancy—the books in the shelves were impassive, as if for a long time they had not been disturbed and no longer expected to be. At Weigand’s indication, the three of them sat down. Weigand himself remained standing.

  “Go ahead, Miss O’Brien,” he said.

  She had made up her mind, by then. To a point, she would tell it just the way it was, the little old man and everything. She did; Weigand did not interrupt. She told of the little old man’s disappearance while she was getting him a drink. Then she paused, involuntarily.

  “Go on,” Bill Weigand said.

  “Well,” she said, “all at once I—I just got scared. I knew he was dead and there wasn’t any way to help. And—well, I’m afraid I just sort of—of panicked. All at once I had to get out of there.”

  “And you did?” Weigand asked. “Just like that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And locked the door after you?”

  She had not thought of that; apparently the door had been locked when the police came. If she could remember about the lock. But she had no time to remember, to speculate.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I was—very worked up. But I think I just pulled the door behind me. Of course, if it’s a snap lock, it would have—”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. He did not say whether the catch on the pet shop door could be set to lock automatically. “And then? You thought better of it, decided to report what you had found, used a telephone?”

  She nodded, not hesitating this time. If it couldn’t be the way Brian wanted it, maybe this way would do. (But why? her mind asked. What’s happening to us?)

  “At about what time?” Weigand asked her.

  And now again she had to hesitate. What time had Brian telephoned the police? Would there be a record? She could only guess, guess vaguely.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” she said. “Probably—oh, a little after four.” But then she realized that didn’t fit. “No,” she said. “It must have been nearer five.”