Murder within Murder Page 4

  Sympathy, Jerry told her, began at home. They could ride. The guard awoke unwillingly and looked at the Norths without enthusiasm. He said, “God,” with the resignation of one who has ceased to expect an answer. He looked at the stairway which ran up beside the elevators and his look was reproachful. He got up and went to the elevator and into it without saying anything, and waited. When the Norths got in he took them up. He stopped at the fifth floor and they got out. He followed them for a step or two, and when they looked at him he looked fixedly at the staircase. Then he got into the elevator and disappeared with it.

  “We’ll walk down,” Pam said. “The poor man.”

  Jerry said nothing but went along the hall until he came to a door at the end marked “North Books, Inc.” He opened the door with his key and stopped and looked at his key.

  “Listen,” he said. “Where was her key? Miss Gipson’s? To this door; to her own door at home. To whatever else she had a right to open? Were they in her bag?”

  Pam shook her head. She said the police had probably taken them out.

  “Bill got the maid’s key from the manager,” Jerry told her. “To the apartment. He didn’t have it.”

  Pam said it was odd, without seeming to think it odd, and why didn’t they go in? They went in. Jerry switched on the lights in the reception-room, comfortable in modern furniture. It was a wide, shallow room, with doors at either end and near the ends in the wall opposite the entrance door. Jerry went to the door in the opposite wall at the right end and threw another tumbler switch, lighting the offices. He went down an inner corridor, with a railing on one side and beyond it desks with typewriters hibernating in them. He switched on more lights in a small office at the end of the corridor. He waved at it and sat down in a chair.

  “Miss Gipson’s,” he said. “Her copies of her notes are in the lower right-hand drawer of the desk. Each copy is clipped to the notebook in which she made her original notes. She used one notebook for each case. My copies are in my office. The originals have been sent to the authors who are going to use them.” He sighed and appeared to go to sleep. He roused himself. “It’s all yours,” he said. “Wake me up when we get home.”

  Pam North looked in the lower right-hand drawer of the desk. Then she looked at Jerry.

  “I’m sorry, Jerry,” she said, “but you did say ‘right?’ Because they aren’t, you know.”

  “They were,” he said. “I suppose she moved them. Look, darling.”

  Pam looked. Then she looked at Jerry.

  “Listen, Jerry,” she said. “Are you sure this is the right office? Because there’s nothing in the desk. Nothing at all.” She paused. “Except some old paper clips and things, of course,” she said. “No notes. No letters.”

  “I tell you—” Jerry said, and suddenly sat up. He went to the desk and pulled out the drawers one after another and shut them again. He looked at Pam. He was no longer sleepy.

  “We were late,” Pam said. “In spite of everything, we were late.”

  Jerry nodded. He said there had evidently been something in Miss Gipson’s desk that somebody wanted.

  “Her murderer,” Pam said.

  “You jump, Pam,” Jerry said. “But probably her murderer.”

  “You wouldn’t like me if I didn’t jump,” Pam said. “We both know that. And it’s foolish to call it a jump. He wanted her notes on the famous crimes.”

  Jerry shook his head at that. He pointed out that that really was a jump. He said it might have been anything—anything that collects in an office desk, even in a month. Letters received at the office, or carried to the office for rereading and left in the desk. Little memoranda, scrawled on slips of paper. Or written on desk calendars.

  They had both thought of that at the same moment. Their heads met over the desk. The desk calendar was there. The uppermost sheet said Tuesday, September 11. But the old sheets—the turned-back sheets—were missing. Two-thirds of the year had vanished. And the past month of Amelia Gipson’s life.

  “Well,” Pam said.

  She watched as Jerry leafed into the future, which was not to be Miss Gipson’s future. In early October there was one notation: “Dentist, 2 P.M.” That was to have been on October 9. Beyond that, in so far as she had confided to her desk calendar, Miss Gipson had had no plans.

  “Perhaps she tore the old ones off and threw them away after they were finished,” Pam said. “The old days.”

  “Perhaps,” Jerry said. “But I never knew anyone who did, did you? From this kind of a calendar, with rings meant to—to hold the past? For reference? Because that’s one thing calendars on office desks are for. Day before yesterday’s telephone numbers—things like that.”

  Pam was nodding slowly.

  “What happened,” she said, “was that everything was taken. Whether it meant anything or not. So we wouldn’t know what did mean something. Don’t you suppose it was that way?”

  Jerry agreed it could have been. He was looking thoughtfully at nothing. Then he said, “Wait here a minute, Pam,” and went out of the office, and she could hear his steps going down the corridor. She stopped hearing them and waited in an office which had grown very still. She waited until surely it was time for him to come back. And then the lights in the general office went out. Pam was on her feet and crying, “Jerry! Jerry!” with her voice rising and then she was running through the office, dim and shadowy with only the light from the office behind her to dispel the darkness. As she ran toward Jerry’s office she saw that there was no light in it.

  She was not afraid, except for Jerry. She forgot to be afraid. But it took her a moment to find the tumbler switch inside the door of Jerry’s office. And then she screamed, because Jerry North was on his hands and knees on the floor and was shaking his head in a puzzled fashion. She ran to him, but by then he was getting up and she stopped. There was a bruise on his forehead and in the center of it a thin line of blood where the skin was broken.

  “Jerry!” she said. “Darling! Oh darling! Are you—”

  She stopped, because, although his face was puzzled and not quite all together, Jerry was grinning at her.

  “No, Pam,” he said, “I’m not all right, as you see. But I’m all right. I just bumped my head.”

  “Somebody hit you!” Pam said. Her voice was high and tense.

  Jerry started to shake his head and then stopped shaking it and put a hand to it. He saw blood on his hand and began to dab at the blood with a handkerchief.

  “I fell into the desk,” he said. “Nobody hit me. But somebody pushed me. From behind, hard. Just as I was reaching for the light switch. It—it caught me off balance. And so I fell into the desk. It—it dazed me for a minute. But I’m all right.”

  “Darling!” Pam said. “And I got you into it. You didn’t want to come. I made you.”

  Jerry said it was all right.

  “Come on,” Pam said. “We’ll go right home. We’ll get a doctor. We’ll—”

  But Jerry, a little unsteadily, was opening a drawer in his desk. He brought out a handful of typewritten sheets.

  “Miss Gipson’s notes,” he said. “On the four cases she’d finished. My copies. So they weren’t—”

  He stopped, because Pam did not seem to be listening to him.

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “There’s perfume in here. There was in Miss Gipson’s office, too, but I was too excited to realize it. The same perfume.”

  Jerry tested the air. He nodded.

  “Not mine,” Pam said. “Not what I’m wearing now, as it wasn’t before. That Fleur de Something or Other. The same as was in her apartment. The murderer’s perfume.”

  Jerry did not say, this time, that she was jumping. He said he thought they ought to get out of there. They went out, leaving the lights burning behind them. It was Pam who rang the elevator bell, and kept on ringing it until the building guard brought the elevator up and glowered at them. This time he spoke, but not until they were at the ground floor.

  “People could use t
he stairs,” he said then. “Coming down, anyway. Other people do.”

  “Who does?” Pam said, quickly.

  “Whoever just went out, of course,” he said. “Who did you think?”

  “But who was it?” Pam said.

  He shook his head at that.

  “I just heard them,” he said. “I didn’t see nobody. Just steps woke me up, but they were gone before I looked.”

  * Pamela North attempted to smell out a murderer in Payoff for the Banker. She was widely misunderstood.

  4

  WEDNESDAY, 7:30 A.M. TO 10:20 A.M.

  The grist was coming in. Bill Weigand, drinking coffee out of a paper container and abstractedly eating an egg sandwich, looked at it without enthusiasm. One hundred and thirty-three men and women, and boys and girls, had filed slips at the central desk in the main reference room between seven o’clock the evening before and closing time. The slips included, along with titles and catalogue numbers, the names and addresses of the readers. Few of these were particularly legible; there was no reason to suppose that, if the murderer were one of them, the murderer would have signed a name and given an address. He—to use a pronoun which was probably erroneous in gender—need not have turned in a slip at all. That was not required; certainly in his case it would not have been indicated. He could have walked through the catalogue-room and into either the North or South Reading Rooms and no one would have questioned him. He could have been looking a word up in a dictionary. He could have been reading the Britannica. Or he could merely have been looking for Miss Amelia Gipson, to see how the poison was working on her.

  That he had been there seemed probable. It had not seemed probable, because obviously it was not necessary for his plan, until Gerald North had called at 2:30 that morning and told of the ransacking of Miss Gipson’s desk at North Books, Inc.; told also of having been pushed into his own desk; added aggrievedly that he had a headache as a result. The intruder had had keys to the office, Jerry North pointed out. Presumably they were Miss Gipson’s keys. Didn’t Bill think?

  Bill Weigand did think. And in that event, the chances were high that—unless, of course, Miss Gipson had given her murderer the keys to the North offices, to facilitate his heavy task—the keys had been taken from the Gipson purse in the confusion which followed her violent attack of illness in the North Reading Room of the library. Therefore, the murderer was in the North Reading Room of the library. The murderer had not taken the folding drinking cup from the purse. Therefore, the murderer had not minded their discovering that a concentrated solution of sodium fluoride had been drunk from the cup. That was not puzzling. Presence of the cup, with its traces of poison, would encourage them to think of suicide. Only Miss Gipson had got the better of her murderer there.

  Bill Weigand sighed, reached for the remains of his sandwich and found there were no remains. He finished his paper cup of coffee, savoring the taste of cardboard—the slight fuzziness of texture which probably was attributable to dissolved wood pulp—and sighed. He was reminded of Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley.

  O’Malley still believed in suicide. He thought the last line Miss Gipson had written, in a hand firm up to the end—before it was no longer a living hand, but a dying one in which a fountain pen trailed meaninglessly—was merely something she had written about the Purdy case. She was taking notes on a poison murder, wasn’t she? The last line mentioned poison, didn’t it? Well?

  “The trouble with you, Weigand,” O’Malley said at 2:35 that morning, just after the Norths had called and just as he was going home to bed—“the trouble with you, Weigand, is that you let the Norths ball things up. Here you’ve got a nice simple suicide and you let the Norths ball you up. Snafu!”

  The word snafu had come late into Inspector O’Malley’s life. He liked it, although sometimes Weigand wondered whether he exactly understood it. It had come to mean anything unduly complicated; anything out of the classic tradition of police work. “Round ’em up and make ’em talk’s what I always say,” O’Malley always did say. Bill Weigand could only think that in O’Malley’s more active days crime had had a pleasing simplicity which now it lacked. He sighed again and dropped the container which had held coffee—perhaps—into a waste-basket. He drummed lightly with the fingers of his right hand on the desk top.

  One hundred and thirty-three men and women, boys and girls, to be interviewed, to see whether they knew anything; had seen anything. Say a dozen of them had given false addresses; in New York it was safe, he thought, that twelve out of a hundred and thirty-three would give false names and addresses for reasons of their own—reasons absurd and serious, obvious and obscure and having, the chances went a hundred to one, no connection whatever with the demise of Miss Amelia Gipson, fifty-two years old, lately of Ward College, more lately of North Books, Inc., having a niece who did not care for her and a friend who was frightened, and no need to take a forty-dollar-a-week job for which she had no special training and probably no consuming interest.

  One hundred and thirty-three of all ages and both sexes, a dozen of whom would be troublesome to find and must, even more than the rest, be found. Because it was never certain that their desire for anonymity had not grown out of the murder of Miss Amelia Gipson. Such a search for privacy, if excessive, was not criminal. Still—it was odd; still it needed explanation. The solution of crime almost inevitably involved the clearing of a half-dozen irrelevant mysteries, few of which any longer interested Bill Weigand. Particularly at 7:30 in the morning, after a night of work; particularly when Dorian was out of town and had taken her smile, so curiously refreshing, with her and would not be back for another six full days, plus an entirely uncalled for six hours.

  The hundred and thirty-three could be left to the precincts, as could the majority of the attendants on duty when Miss Gipson had been taken ill. That was something; all Weigand and his own people would have to do would be to collate the information, if any was gathered. It would be pleasant if one of the hundred and thirty-three had seen Miss Gipson in the grip of a powerful man with a black beard, one leg and other arresting peculiarities and had seen this spectacular creature pouring poison forcefully into her mouth. Bill Weigand was afraid that so simple a pleasure would be denied him. He thought the attendant, already questioned, who had seen Miss Gipson pass through the catalogue-room into the outer hall and return a little later, and who had deduced that she had gone down the hall to drink from one of the wall fountains, had told them as much as anybody would be apt to about the actual injection of the poison.

  But someone, among those who had gathered around Miss Gipson when she suddenly made a terrible sound, which was half scream and half retching, and collapsed sideways over the arm of the chair, might have seen something of significance. One of them might have seen a man—or, if perfume meant anything, a woman—handling Miss Gipson’s purse; might even have seen someone take something out of it. That would be very helpful. Unfortunately, only three of those persons had lingered long enough to be interrogated by the patrolman who first reached the scene. Weigand read over the terse reports of their interrogation:

  “Roger Burnside, student, of 201A, Grand Concourse, the Bronx, said he was sitting across from deceased and had his attention attracted by a strange sound emanating from her. Describes sound as a low scream. Looked up to see her staring at him. He thinks she tried to speak and could not. He thinks she was writing something. Says she then collapsed across arm of chair in which she was sitting and began to vomit. Went to her assistance but was preceded by several other persons, none of whom he can describe, and found his assistance unnecessary. Remained on the chance it might be.”

  “Florence Pettley, housewife: Was looking up recipes in a cookbook when heard strange, dreadful sound behind her and turned around to find elderly woman apparently very ill. Asked to describe illness, said: ‘She seemed to be sick at her stomach.’ Went to her and found her moaning and apparently unable to speak; very sick at the stomach. Held deceased’s head and tri
ed to talk to her, but doubts if deceased heard or understood.”

  “John Gallahady, unemployed, was reading old copies of The New Yorker at table on other side of central aisle: Heard retching sound from elderly woman who looked like a teacher in a fresh-water college and saw her begin to throw up. Went to see what he could do to help and decided there was nothing, but remained on chance there might be. Started to leave when he himself became nauseated but was stopped by arrival of police, who asked him to remain, since he had been a witness. Remembers plump housewife—presumably a reference to Mrs. Pettley—fussing about but did not particularly notice anyone else.”

  Those were the ones they had. There were then only one hundred and thirty to go. The others probably would be even less helpful. Then, just as he was about to toss the three reports into a basket, he paused. About one of the interviews there had been something that lingered, faintly disturbing, in his memory. He looked at them again.

  The last person—John Gallahady—had been a good guesser. Ward College would not like being called “fresh-water.” But it was a small college and not famous. Mr. Gallahady was acute. It might be interesting to know what made him so acute. Weigand rummaged among the papers on his desk and found the typed, alphabetized, list of persons who had signed out for books. He ran a pencil down the G’s. No Gallahady. No—

  “Damn,” Weigand said. “Of course!”

  There were only eleven now to be discovered among those who had used false names. One was found. For Gallahady, read Galahad. Caxton, setting up the type for Sir Thomas Malory’s “Noble and Joyous Book entytled Le Morte d’Arthur” had once reversed that reading, for Galahad had set Gallahady. Weigand groped to ascertain how he knew this. Then, dimly, he remembered that he had been reading the Noble Tale in a reprint edition on a rainy day in the country during the summer; reading it lacking all other reading. And had seen a footnote and remembered it.

  So John Gallahady was Sir Galahad, going to the succor of a distressed gentlewoman, was he? Very fanciful, the unemployed gentleman who had been reading The New Yorker in the library and had not quite got away before the police came. A little pedantic in his allusions. Weigand thought it would be interesting to talk to Mr. Gallahady and wished he could. The chances did not seem good; false name probably meant also false address—an address in the West Fifties. Bill Weigand looked at the address, which somehow seemed authentic. A good many unemployed gentlemen lived in those blocks, in small, dusty rooms. There was a chance that Gallahady, having little time to think, had given an authentic address—addresses were harder to think of than names, sometimes, particularly if you did not very well know the city.