The Norths Meet Murder Read online

  “Right,” said Mr. and Mrs. North in rather embarrassing unison.

  Pete had, Mrs. North thought, been gone fifteen minutes, perhaps, and then he had come in, sure enough from the roof. And that was all yesterday—Weigand looked as if he doubted it. He said he didn’t want to lead her, but he wondered if there wasn’t something else. “Pertinent?” said Mrs. North. “I don’t think so.” Martha cleaned the apartment and went marketing and then had gone home, Mrs. North said.

  “And, of course, we went to Mr. Edwards’ party in the evening,” Mrs. North said. About seven, she thought, and they had a buffet supper. “You know, sliced turkey and ham and salads and lobster and things,” she explained. “I didn’t feel so well this morning, either, probably because of something I ate. The ham, maybe, or—” She paused a moment. “The lobster tasted a little flat, too,” she said, reflectively.

  Lieutenant Weigand said that he didn’t suppose Mr. Edwards’ party had anything to do with it, and both the Norths agreed.

  “Nothing else?” Weigand wanted to know. “Nothing out of the ordinary? Nobody called?”

  Mrs. North said no. Then she thought of something, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary.

  “There was Western Union,” she said. “But it was the wrong house.”

  “Yes?” Weigand said.

  It was, Mrs. North pointed out, nothing of interest. The doorbell had rung and she had clicked and then when nobody came up, opened the door of their apartment and called down the stairs. It had been Western Union, looking for a Mr. Shavely, or some such name, and she had told him there was no Mr. Shavely. Western Union had said “sorry” and gone away, and that was all.

  “You’re sure he went away?” Weigand asked. Mrs. North was. She had heard the door of the vestibule, which closed noisily, slam as she was closing her own.

  “Did you see him?” Weigand persisted.

  She hadn’t, nor could she say anything about his voice, and was obviously puzzled at the detective’s interest. And then, a moment before Mr. North thought of it, she said, “Oh!

  “You mean—?” she said.

  “They had to get in someway,” Weigand pointed out. “Or one of them had to get in, and let the other in. And they would have needed keys to get from the vestibule to the hall. Right?”

  The Norths nodded.

  “So the simplest dodge would be to ring somebody’s bell and then pretend to be looking for someone else, and then pretend to go out by slamming the door from inside. I think we can assume somebody did that.”

  “The murderer?” North said.

  Weigand nodded.

  “Or the victim,” he said. “Either could have got in first, of course. So you see why the voice is important, Mrs. North.”

  Mrs. North said she did, but that she couldn’t help. It was just a voice, and sounded as if the man had a cold. That was all. Weigand nodded. “Probably held his nose a little, or talked through a handkerchief,” he said. “You didn’t hear anybody go up?”

  Mrs. North hadn’t, and Weigand said he didn’t suppose she would have. The stairs, he pointed out, were solid and the carpet was heavy. Nobody wanting to be quiet need be heard, he thought. Somebody, knowing about those things, and the darkness of the hall and the habits of the tenants, had almost certainly got in that way.

  “The murderer, undoubtedly,” Mr. North said, but Weigand shook his head and said there was nothing to tell. They would have to know more of what had happened, and something of whom it had happened to, before they could decide. But Mrs. North shook her head at that, and both the men looked at her. Mrs. North said that of course it was the murderer.

  “Why?” Mr. North said.

  “Because of the trouble,” Mrs. North said. “He had to go to the trouble of planning how to get in and then of getting in. So of course it was the murderer.”

  The men looked at each other and shook their heads in a puzzled way. Mrs. North, seeing this, said, with a little scorn, that it was per fectly obvious.

  “Nobody,” Mrs. North said, “is going to that much trouble to get murdered. But if you’re going to murder somebody, you expect to go to a lot of trouble. I would.”

  “Well,” said Mr. North and then he looked at Lieutenant Weigand. Lieutenant Weigand was looking at Mrs. North in a startled way and, once again, Mr. North recognized an expression which, he knew, he himself often involuntarily assumed. He had an impulse to help the detective, and then he realized that there was nothing he could do. Lieutenant Weigand would have to learn his own way about, like other men. And when he did, Mr. North thought, he would learn that Mrs. North was very likely right. Mr. North himself was now entirely convinced that it had been the murderer who had pretended to be Western Union looking for Mr. Shavely, although he could see that Lieutenant Weigand might, quite reasonably, remain unpersuaded. The lieutenant would, Mr. North thought again, simply have to learn.

  “Of course—” Weigand said, after a minute. Then he broke off and said suddenly, “Mullins!” The Norths were startled because they had forgotten Mullins was there, sitting in a corner; Mullins apparently was startled, too, for he said, first “Huh?” in an awakened tone and only then, “O.K., Loot.”

  “Go up and see how they’re coming upstairs,” he said. “And then go and ask the landlady, Mrs.—”

  “Buano,” North said.

  “Buano, if she let any strangers into the house yesterday. And then comeback.”

  Mullins said, “O.K., Loot,” and went away. Weigand sat a moment, thinking, and paying little attention to the Norths. When he did speak, it was more to himself than to them.

  “Jumping at conclusions, of course,” he said. “The Western Union boy may have been a Western Union boy looking for a man named Shavely. The murderer might have come in any time earlier, and hidden when she was up and—”

  “No,” said Mr. North, “I don’t think so. The window, you know. It was closed when she was there, open later.” Weigand said, “Umm,” thoughtfully.

  “Then there couldn’t have been a body there when I was,” Mrs. North said. “I’m glad because I would have been frightened.”

  Both Weigand and North thought that one over, but neither said anything.

  “It gives you the time if it was the Western Union boy,” Mr. North pointed out. Weigand nodded. Then Mullins poked his head in and said they were about through up there. “D.O.A.,” Mullins said, “and no M.E. yet. I’ll buzz Mrs. Buano, huh?” Weigand nodded and Mullins started off. Then Weigand called him and asked if the Doc had made a guess on the time of death. “Just a guess is all I want,” Weigand said. The Doc had, it appeared: “Not much more than twenty-four hours, not much less than eighteen.” Weigand looked mildly reproving, and said he hoped the Medical Examiner would do better. “Not that he will,” Weigand added, a shade morosely.

  “What’s D.O.A.?” Mrs. North asked.

  “The man upstairs,” Weigand said. “Dead on arrival, the ambulance surgeon said. And M.E. is Medical Examiner. Right?”

  Mrs. North said, “Thank you,” and then both the Norths waited while Weigand thought. Then Mullins, who seemed now to be moving very rapidly, came back and stuck his head in again.

  “She says no,” Mullins said. “She didn’t let nobody in.”

  Weigand nodded and after a while nodded again, more decisively.

  “It starts us, anyway,” he said. “We’ll call it the Western Union boy, anyway until we know better. It gives us a time, about—About when, Mrs. North, as near as you can come?”

  Mrs. North thought a minute, and said that after she had come down she had had to wash her hands, because she touched something dusty up there, and then she had sat down to read and then the bell had rung. It had been about ten minutes, or perhaps fifteen, after she had come down. She thought around three-thirty, one way or the other. Weigand nodded.

  “Probably before rather than after,” the detective said. “People tend to overestimate time, usually. Say 3:25, or even 3:20.”

  “Tha
t’s one limit, then,” Mr. North said. Mr. North was acutely interested and was, he discovered, forgetting how horribly real the body had been. Weigand nodded.

  “But any time from then on,” North pointed out. “From, say 3:30 to midnight?”

  Weigand hesitated for a moment, and then did not answer directly. Instead, he said that there was something upstairs he wanted them to look at, and stood up. The Norths got up too, and followed him upstairs. At the door they stopped, startled at the number of things which seemed to be going on, illuminated by harsh floodlights. Men were, apparently, looking for fingerprints everywhere, and two men were taking pictures. There were flashes from the bathroom and Mrs. North came closer to her husband and put a hand on his arm. He closed his free hand over it, reassuringly, and after a moment she smiled at him. Several of the men looked at the Norths briefly, nodded to Weigand and continued their work.

  “Here’s what I want you to look at,” Weigand said, and led them to the open window. He pointed to the broad, dusty sill. The dust had been disturbed, irregularly, and the Norths looked at it, puzzled. Weigand apparently expected them to say something. He looked at Mr. North inquiringly. Mr. North had just begun to shake his head, when Mrs. North spoke.

  “Pete,” she said. “See, there’s a paw. And there—” she paused for a moment. “There’s where he sat,” she said. “He came up here when he was lost and the window was open—why, Pete saw it!”

  Weigand said that of course they didn’t know it was Pete.

  “But it was a cat,” Mr. North said, “and it’s hard for a cat to get here, unless it climbs the fire-ladder, and it wouldn’t.”

  It occurred to him that he sounded rather like Mrs. North, but it was perfectly clear to him. It was clear to Weigand, too, evidently, since he nodded. He said that it probably was Pete, all right, and that the murderer had arrived in time to open the window while the cat was lost. That was—? Mrs. North guessed it as between 3:30 and 4 o’clock.

  “But he wouldn’t go straight up,” she said. “He never goes anywhere until he’s smelled the porch roof, and it would take him a minute or two to make up his mind to come in after he came down, unless—” She stopped, and Weigand nodded again.

  “Unless he was scared,” Mrs. North went on. “Then he’d bolt home and what would scare him there but—” She stopped suddenly. “He saw the murderer!” she said. “And it scared him, poor kitty.”

  Weigand kept on nodding, and said it could be that way; could very easily be that way. “I was wondering about the marks,” he said, “and then you told me about the cat being lost. But would it scare him, do you think? Or would he just be interested?”

  The Norths consulted briefly, and silently, and Mr. North said he thought Pete would be scared if there was sudden movement, or a struggle of if anything fell.

  “And then he’d run home at once?” Weigand asked. Mr. North thought so and Mrs. North was sure of it. Weigand nodded slowly, and said that that might do it.

  “That would make it around four o’clock,” he said. “A little before, or after. Just before he came back. It isn’t final, obviously, but it’s something to go on. Tentatively. Right?”

  He did not give them time to answer, because just then there was a stir near the door, and somebody yelled: “O.K., bring it up.” Weigand looked over toward the door, nodded at a man entering with a physician’s black bag in his hand, and said to the Norths that probably they’d better go down to their apartment and stick around. Mr. North lifted inquiring eyebrows at him and he nodded.

  “The basket,” Weigand said. “They’re about ready to take it away. That was the Medical Examiner. You don’t want her—” Weigand nodded at Mrs. North, and Mr. North realized that the detective was quite right, not only as regarded Mrs. North, but as far as he was concerned, too. “No more bodies right now,” he thought, and guided Mrs. North out and down. Weigand remained behind, talking with the Medical Examiner.

  “Well!” said Mrs. North, when they were downstairs again and had the lights on. Mr. North felt, he said, precisely the same way, and they looked at each other with surprised expressions. Then Mrs. North said that things certainly were funny, when you didn’t expect them. After a moment she added that the detective was nice, and not what she would have expected. She said she had thought derby hats.

  “I thought derby hats and cigars,” she said. “But he’s just like anybody. You wouldn’t think he was.”

  “That’s what he keeps Mullins for,” Mr. North suggested. “Mullins couldn’t be anything else, and he guarantees Weigand.”

  Mrs. North agreed that that was probably what they had Mullins for.

  3

  TUESDAY

  7 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT

  Lieutenant Weigand looked thoughtfully, even a little wonderingly, after the Norths when they started downstairs; he smiled a moment reminiscently and then recalled himself sharply to the business in hand. There was, clearly, an abundance of business. He talked to the Assistant Medical Examiner for a moment, learning that he agreed with the ambulance surgeon as to the approximate time of death, that a post mortem might—or, on the other hand, might not—give more accurate information and that the body would be posted at once.

  “Then if he’s eaten recently you’ll know about when he died,” the physician observed. “That is,” he added, “if you know when he ate.”

  Weigand thanked him and thought he might as well eat himself. He collected Mullins, left word that everything should be rushed as much as possible and all data sent to his office at Headquarters, and led Mullins out. Walking with Mullins, who was so inescapably a detective, always made Weigand feel, obscurely, as if he were under arrest. Mullins was often helpful, however; just now he knew a swell place around the corner to eat. He led the way to it, and into a long, noisy barroom, with tables in the rear. There was a noticeable lessening of the noise when Mullins entered and everybody looked at Weigand curiously, and with sympathy. Weigand stifled a rising suspicion that any kitchen in the establishment would be there merely as a legal device, satisfying the statute which, in New York, requires a readiness to serve food on the part of all who want to serve liquor.

  Weigand, reflecting that he was on duty, drank two quick martinis, after which things were noticeably better. Mullins had an old-fashioned, and another old-fashioned. Weigand looked at the menu and had another martini, which gave him strength to order. He looked at the New England Pot Roast which resulted and speculated on the desirability of another martini, but decided against it. There was, after all, Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley. Artemus was no teetotaler; on the other hand, he would view any tendency to stagger with disapproval. Weigand ate quickly, nervously, and waited for Mullins, who ate slowly and thoroughly. Mullins finished his pie and showed an inclination to talk.

  “It’s a funny one, all right,” Mullins said. “Why do we get the funny ones, huh? Why not just ordinary blastings? The kind you just give a couple of guys a going over for?”

  Weigand shook his head, not knowing the answers. It was a funny one, all right—a bare man in a bare apartment. You couldn’t start more completely from scratch, if you came to that. Weigand moved his head again, nodding this time to show that he agreed with Mullins.

  “With a blasting, you know where you are, and can just round guys up,” Mullins added, plodding after his thought. He smiled at the thought when he overtook it. Mullins liked to round guys up. His smile was succeeded by a somber expression, and Weigand could chart the arrival of realization that there was nobody to be rounded up. Then Mullins brightened again.

  “How about these North guys?” he said. “They’d talk, all right.” He looked hopefully at Weigand. “They’re screwy, anyhow,” Mullins urged.

  Weigand shook his head, and Mullins’ hopes visibly subsided. He sighed deeply, and looked at the menu again, seeking comfort. But Weigand shook his head once more.

  “We’ve got to see the chief,” he said. “Dear old Arty. And how he’ll love it.”
r />   They rose, Mullins reluctantly.

  “And don’t tell Arty that one about the Norths,” Weigand warned. “The idea’s screwier than they are. Right?”

  Mullins said, “O.K.” without enthusiasm. The more he thought about the Norths, his face reported to the lieutenant, the more he thought it would be a fine idea to go over them a bit. They would be easy to round up, too. But maybe the Loot knew best.

  They picked up their car and Mullins winked on its red emergency lights. Then, to the accompaniment of a stimulatingly alarming noise from the siren, they went down to Centre Street. Mullins went, on order, to the Homicide Bureau office and inquired with decision whether a lot of things were being done. They were, because the police department knows ways of starting from scratch; because a naked body, male, 165 pounds, five feet ten inches, brown hair and eyes, age about forty, has ways of speaking even after the tongue is stilled. Department experts, without direction from Mullins, were trying to make it speak.

  The Medical Examiner’s office was taking it apart with knives, and reserving portions for analysis, and sewing it up again. Fingerprint men had long since photographed and enlarged the prints of the dead fingers, and found that there were none in the department files to match them. Copies of the enlargements had been started by air mail to Washington and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and there more experts compared them with yet more files, and found nothing. To the Federal Bureau, too, went precise physical descriptions, backed by measurements, and those, reduced to punch marks in a key card, sent thousands of other cards whirling through a machine, and expelled a few of them—including cards which gave names and last addresses and other significant details of three men long since dead, two serving life sentences and another at that moment awaiting trial for bank robbery. This was not as helpful as it might have been.

  And the body’s teeth were examined. They turned out, to everyone’s annoyance, to be remarkably healthy teeth, showing only a few small fillings and no really intricate dental construction. It was a setback; nevertheless, dental charts were prepared on what data there was, and sent circulating among dentists, on the off chance. The Bureau of Missing Persons came into it, checking the description of the body against those of men who had wandered, unreported, from their homes, and one or two promising leads were turned up. Detectives hurried with photographs to consult worried men and women who might prove to be relatives of what had been found in the bathtub of 95 Greenwich Place, and men and women looked at the photographs fearfully and sighed over them with relief. For that came to nothing, too.