Untidy Murder Page 3

  This little dark man, now, who had come into the elevator just after her—his face was interesting precisely because it was somehow so remarkably only a face. It was a face, she thought, and smiled to herself, that she had seen all her life. It was the basic face; the face of which all others were variations. That was why it seemed for an instant familiar; why, until she analyzed it, she had an impression she had seen this man before somewhere, and recently. It was merely that she had seen the variations of which this was the theme. This swarthy face was almost all the other faces she had seen that day.

  She became conscious that she had been looking intently at the man when he turned away a little, breaking her gaze. He was embarrassed, of course; she had been staring at him. How often I must do that, Dorian thought; how impolite I must seem. And this small swarthy man was already at a disadvantage, a man alone in an elevator full of women. He was not, she thought, a man really accustomed to such a situation. He did not look even like a man whose wife would very often lead him into Bonwit’s or Saks or one of the shops on Fifty-seventh. It was more likely that he worked for the store—fixed things for the store. Bells stopped ringing, lights went out, and the little man came up from wherever they kept him and made repairs.

  She got off on the seventh floor and the little man got off with her. She did not look at him closely again. She was only conscious that he hesitated a moment, as if waiting for guidance, after he got out of the elevator. She went, moving quickly—it would be appreciated if her pace conveyed an appropriate consciousness that she was tardy—to the hairdressing salon. Mabel was waiting for her. Mabel looked at her wrist watch as Dorian came up. Dorian smiled.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mabel,” she said.

  Mabel smiled too, then.

  “It doesn’t matter, madam,” Mabel said. “I’ll hurry you through.”

  This wasn’t a jam, exactly, but it was a hell of a setup. If a man stuck out merely by being in a store like this, he would certainly stick out a lot worse in a hairdressing salon. And now a woman with gray hair, a woman in a black dress, was coming toward him. She looked a little surprised, he thought.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she said, in a voice without conviction, with rather excessive questioning in its inflection.

  “Huh?” the swarthy man said, involuntarily. This was quite a dame too, in her way. He caught himself.

  “Meeting the wife,” he said. “Told me to meet her here.” He looked around. “Having her hair done,” he said. “This the right place?”

  “Oh yes,” the woman in the black dress said. Her voice was, however, a little puzzled. “It was Bonwit’s?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Said she’d be through in about an hour, she thought. Started at two. That right?”

  “Why, I’m afraid not,” the woman said. “I’m afraid it would take longer than that. I suppose it was a set?”

  “A set?” the man said. “She was just having her hair done, I guess.” He was obviously puzzled. “Set of what?” he said.

  The woman sighed. She looked more than ever surprised.

  I’ve pulled a boner, the man thought. It worried him. Boy, he was sticking out, all right.

  “A hair set,” the woman said. “I don’t imagine she could be finished in under a couple of hours. That would be—” She looked at her watch. She looked at the man. “A little after four,” she said. “Say forty-five minutes from now.” She looked at him again. “Of course,” she said, “you could wait.” She did not, he could tell, regard this as a favorable solution to their problem.

  “I guess I got it wrong,” he said. “Maybe she said two hours. I guess I’d better come back later.”

  The woman’s face brightened.

  “That might be better,” she said. “More convenient.”

  She walked with him to the bank of elevators, watched him get into one going down. Ritzy, the dame was. Didn’t want him hanging around. O.K. That was all right with him. He didn’t want to hang around—and didn’t need to. He knew where the subject was going to be for a couple of hours. At least he could take a chance on it. Apparently the normal course would be for her to have a “set.” Apparently that would take a couple of hours.

  He went out of the store, with some relief, and flagged a taxicab. He gave an address in East Thirty-seventh Street. Fifteen minutes later, agreeing that, yeah, the Dodgers looked hot again, he paid the driver and went up a short flight of brownstone stairs. He went up unhesitatingly, as if he knew precisely where he was going.

  In the marble foyer he looked at the names over four bells. The place had an apartment on each floor, apparently. Three of the names elicited no response from the swarthy man. The fourth one seemed to puzzle him for a moment. Then he swore. He straightened up, looked around the foyer as if seeking advice and, apparently finding it, reached out and rang the bell under the name which had disturbed him. He waited and rang it again. When nothing happened he waited a little longer and then went out of the foyer and back down the stairs. He walked east and found a telephone booth in a stationery store.

  By the dim light in the booth he looked at a number written on the back of an envelope. He put the envelope down where he could see it, dropped his nickel and started to dial. Then he said, “Oh, hell,” and hung the receiver up. He found another nickel and started over again. This time, without consulting the envelope, he dialed through. After a moment, a man’s voice said, “Yeah?”

  “Farno?” the man in the booth said. “This is Piper.”

  “Sure,” the other man said. “What?”

  “This subject,” Piper said, “I picked her up.”

  “I know you picked her up,” Farno said.

  “So she goes to a place in Thirty-seventh Street,” Piper said. He gave the number. “She goes in and stays a couple of minutes and comes out again, see? So I ditches the car and follows her. She walks, Farno!”

  “Tough,” Farno said. “Sure as hell tough, fella.”

  “So,” Piper said, not answering that, “she goes to this place Bonwit Telly. You know? A store.”

  “Yeah,” Farno said.

  “So she goes up with a lotta other dames and I gotta go up too. See? She gets off on the seventh floor and goes in a place where they set hair. You know, Farno? Kind of a barber, I guess.”

  “All right, for God’s sake,” Farno said. “All right, fella.”

  “So I find out from a dame there that it takes a coupla hours to fix her hair up, see? I don’t ask right out, naturally, but I sorta shop around and find out. O.K.?”

  “Cagey,” Farno said. “I’ll bet you were cagey as hell.”

  “Yeah,” Piper said. “So I finds out it takes a coupla hours and I beats it back to this place in Thirty-seventh. See? The place she went into.”

  “I got you, fella,” Farno said. “You beats it back to this place.”

  “Figuring she went to see somebody there,” Piper said. “Get it? Figuring it might give us a lead, see? Maybe, I thought, she even lives there. Maybe it’s a sorta hide-out. Get it?”

  “Hell yes,” Farno said. “I get it.”

  “Figuring I can pick her up again after she gets this hair set,” Piper said, being slow and careful about it. “O.K.?”

  “Yeah,” Farno said.

  “Now listen,” Piper said, speaking even more slowly. “Who do you think lives there? Who do you think?”

  “The girl,” Farno said. “The subject.”

  In the booth, Piper shook his head vigorously.

  “Only it ain’t,” he said. “You got it wrong, Farno. Bill Weigand lives there. Weigand!” He paused a moment, and there was no answer for a moment. “Hell,” Piper said, “you mean you don’t know who Weigand is?”

  Farno spoke slowly now. He seemed puzzled.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know who Weigand is, all right.”

  “So,” Piper said. “Then you get it. This babe—this subject now—knows Weigand. She wants to tell him something, see? So she goes to his apartment t
o tell him. And what does she want to tell him, Farno?”

  “She knows something about this guy Wilming’s falling out the window,” Farno said. “She goes there and tells him.” He sounded puzzled. “Jeez, this thing could be on the level.”

  “Huh?” Piper said.

  “Skip it,” Farno said, and his voice was abrupt. “So she sees Weigand and spills it. O.K., we fade. Fast.”

  “Wait a minute,” Piper said. “She didn’t spill anything. On account of Weigand wasn’t there. Because she wasn’t gone more than a coupla minutes, and when I get back I rings his bell, see, and he ain’t there. So I figure she didn’t find him, and went off to get her hair set, and will be maybe coming back. See?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Why wouldn’t she call him up?” Farno said. “At headquarters?”

  “Because maybe she’s got something to show him,” Piper said. “A clue or something, see? And it works out better somehow to see him where he lives. Get it?”

  “No,” Farno said. “For all you know she’s down at headquarters now, spilling whatever she knows. I still think we fade out.”

  “Look,” Piper said, “I thought you said there was money in this? Why do we fade out? Anyhow, until we know we gotta?”

  “Well—” Farno said.

  Piper jumped at it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now look, Farno. You’re the boss and everything, but just look a minute. Why don’t I pick up the heap and just sorta wait around. At this place on Thirty-seventh, see? If she don’t come back, then she’s seen Weigand somewhere else or, like you say, given him a ring. But if she does show up, then she ain’t seen him, see? And I get to her before she does see him and bring her along to the flat like you said first. See?”

  “Yeah,” Piper said, as if he were thinking. “I—where are you now, Piper?”

  Piper told him. They talked for a minute or two longer and Piper left the booth. He did not go back up Thirty-seventh Street. Instead he got the car, parked it in Thirty-seventh Street and walked back to Fourth Avenue. He went into a bar and grill. He had a beer. After he finished it, he had another.

  “Well, I guess that about wraps it up,” Detective Sergeant Flanagan said, and there was a note of finality in his voice. “You see it hangs together, Mr. Stanton?”

  “I suppose so,” Buford Stanton said. He sounded reluctant. He shook his head. He seemed to grow angry suddenly. “I’ve got a magazine to run,” he said, and his voice went up. “I’ve got to have the right people to help run it. Good God, man!”

  “Nobody blames you, Mr. Stanton,” Flanagan said, in a slow, gentle voice.

  “No?” Stanton said. “How about me, Sergeant? I blame myself. How can I help it?”

  “Wait a minute,” Donald Helms said. He was standing by Stanton’s desk, with Flanagan, looking down at the editor. “Wait a minute, Mr. Stanton. If the sergeant’s right, you still can’t blame yourself.”

  “Can’t I?” Stanton said. “Why can’t I, Helms?”

  “Because if he did it, it was because of more than the job,” Helms said. “Maybe finding out you were going to let him go tipped him over. But it wasn’t the only thing. And anything might have—have been the last straw.”

  “My God, Helms,” Stanton said. “Quotations! Old sayings! Camels with broken backs!”

  Helms flushed. The flush showed through tan, it ran up to blond hair. The flush made him look, for a moment, younger than the thirty-five one would have guessed; it made him seem almost defenseless, for all his height and obvious strength.

  Stanton grinned at him; the grin was quick and unexpected; it did unexpected and pleasant things to his face.

  “Forget it,” Stanton said. “Sure anything might have broken the camel’s back. If he did jump.”

  Helms’s flush faded. He nodded.

  “You’ve got to see that,” he said. “There’s no sense in blaming yourself. You can’t keep on people you don’t need because there’s a chance they’ll kill themselves.”

  “I know,” Stanton said. “Forget it, Helms.”

  “Anyway,” Helms said, and now Sergeant Flanagan turned toward him, “how do we know he did kill himself? How do we know he didn’t just fall?”

  “We don’t,” Flanagan said. “We just guess.” He said it easily.

  “He was going on vacation next week,” Helms said. “He’d made plans. Hell, I was going out to his place tonight.” He spoke directly to Sergeant Flanagan. “He had a little weekend place out in New Jersey,” he said. “Near Mr. Stanton’s. Out beyond Princeton. A weekend cottage. Mr. Stanton rents it to him.”

  Flanagan looked at Stanton, and Stanton nodded.

  “Used to be a guest house or something,” he said. “Wilming wanted a place to go.”

  “We were going out this evening,” Helms said. “We were going to Mr. Stanton’s later. Would he make all those plans if he were—if he knew he wasn’t going to carry them out?”

  “He might,” Flanagan said. “He may have decided all at once not to carry them out. He hadn’t changed them?”

  Helms started to speak, and then hesitated. There was some uncertainty in his voice when he spoke again.

  “Well,” he said, “he had in a way. Not essentially. I was still going out. But he was going to stay in town over night and come out in the morning. He had some things to clean up before he went on this vacation—this terminal leave, it really was, I guess. Last minute things.” He paused and looked at Stanton. “Didn’t he?”

  “I shouldn’t have thought so,” Stanton said. “I’d have thought everything was cleaned up.”

  “Well, that’s what he told me, anyhow,” Helms said. “I was to drive out to the cottage in his car and he was to come later. That was the only change of plans. I was to open the place up—turn on the electricity, that sort of thing—and then drive over to Mr. Stanton’s and explain that Wilming was tied up and—well, represent Wilming if necessary. If we talked about the book.”

  “The book?” Flanagan said.

  “An argot,” Stanton said. “Our own clichés. A magazine’s a book to the people who get it out.”

  “So you see—” Helms started, and Flanagan shook his head.

  “I see he was a friend of yours, Mr. Helms,” Flanagan said. “He was, wasn’t he?”

  “The best,” Helms said. “For years. Hell, he got me in here. And before that—oh, skip it.”

  “So naturally you’d rather it weren’t suicide,” Flanagan said. “It’s very natural. But I think it was. I think, if you look at it from the outside, you’ll agree with me. I think he was planning it when he made his change of plans, a change which meant that from this evening you more or less took over in his place with Mr. Stanton here. I think he was giving you a break, knowing he was out anyway and hoping you’d—” He stopped.

  “O.K.,” Stanton said. “He knew Helms here was moving in.”

  “And,” Flanagan went on, “you say he had always been devoted, very devoted, to his mother. Lived with her all his life. And that she died a couple of months ago?”

  “Yes,” Helms said.

  “I don’t know how many things like that—losing his job, a morbid sorrow about his mother, maybe a dozen things we don’t know about—added up for him,” Flanagan said. “I’m a policeman, not a doctor. But I think a lot of things did and—well, the window was open. He stood there and maybe said, ‘The hell with it,’ and jumped. Maybe.…”

  Helms shook his head. He still seemed unconvinced. Flanagan stopped and waited.

  “I can’t believe he was planning anything like that,” Helms said. “Even thinking about it. He—he was planning ahead. Not just for this weekend. As if he—I mean, planning the way everybody does.” He paused, his face thoughtful, remembering.

  “For example,” he said, “only Wednesday—day before yesterday—he spent the afternoon at his oculist’s, getting a checkup, getting a prescription for new glasses. Would he have done that sort of thing if—”

&nb
sp; This time it was Helms who stopped because of Flanagan’s expression, and the nodding of Flanagan’s head.

  “You’re trying to be logical,” Flanagan said. “What you don’t understand, Mr. Helms, is that suicide usually isn’t logical. It sort of comes over people, apparently. As I said, suddenly a man says, ‘Oh, the hell with it,’ and jumps out a window. Maybe just before he’s to go to dinner with his girl. Maybe when he seems to have laid things out for weeks ahead. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way it happens.”

  He seemed very sure. Helms shrugged.

  “All right,” Helms said. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way you think. Anyway, he’s dead. It doesn’t make much difference.”

  Flanagan nodded and said that was right.

  “Not much difference as long as he wasn’t pushed,” he said. “He jumped, I think. He fell, you’d rather think. It’s all the same, except on the records.” He smiled faintly. “We have to keep a lot of records,” he said.

  Dorian looked at her hair in the mirror and decided that, taking everything into account, she preferred Mr. Henri to Mr. Armand. He was better at the back, even if perhaps not quite so good at the front. The balance was in his favor. She looked at the watch on her wrist, said “Hmm!” because it was later than she thought, and left Bonwit’s rather rapidly. Fortune beamed upon her and a taxicab driver smiled. He looked at her more closely and smiled again, pleased and brightened. Dorian filed in her memory his name and hack license number, having learned that it was well to remember such matters and being, at any rate in small things, obedient. Then she said, “Is your name really Thomas Jefferson?”