Death Has a Small Voice Page 5

  “We have to try to trace down every connection,” Bill said. “Even connections as remote as this. We’re looking for, talking to, everybody we can find who knew Harry Eaton. We’re trying to find out where Eaton was yesterday, and the day before—who he saw, what he did, what he had for breakfast Sunday. Among other things, of course, we’d like to know when he broke into Miss Godwin’s house. You see, we don’t know what may turn out to be useful. Snappers-up of unconsidered trifles.”

  “Shakespeare,” Mr. Rogers said. “Winter’s Tale, I think. Hilda may be anywhere. Probably she is. She comes and she goes.

  “So we were told,” Bill said, and Gilbert Rogers said, “Um?”

  “A man named Wilson,” Bill told him. “Bernard Wilson. Tall, good looking, forty-odd.”

  “I know Wilson,” Rogers said. “Damned near everybody knows Wilson. Creative writing at Dyckman, you know.”

  Bill shook his head.

  “Professor of,” Rogers told him. “Also critic, essayist, general consultant in the world of literature. And Rhodes Scholar. As a matter of fact, he gives us opinions now and then. He knew Hilda in the great days, you know. Where did you run into him?”

  Bill explained where he had run into Professor Bernard Wilson. Rogers smiled. “Going to give her tea, was he?” he said. “That would interest her. Tea!”

  Three-fourths of all questioning, perhaps of all conversation, is irrelevant, Bill Weigand thought. This, however, seemed to be going a little far. Nevertheless, he repeated, “The great days?”

  “The first fine careless rapture,” Rogers said. He did not bother to identify. “Hilda’s lyric life. About five years ago—that is, she started eight years ago when she was about seventeen. Very precocious. She kept at it until about four years ago, and stopped. Poetry, she thinks, is for the young. At twenty-one our Hilda decided she was outgrowing it.”

  “She was very good, I’m told,” Bill said.

  “She was wonderful, to put it simply,” Rogers said. “In all ways, I’m told—I didn’t know her in those days. Although—” He broke off.

  “But you spoke of a book,” Weigand said. “A book of hers you have. A collection?”

  Rogers shook his head.

  “A novel,” he said. “She’s taken to prose in—well, in what I suppose she thinks of as middle life.”

  “You people are going to publish it?” Bill asked.

  “Oh, I think so,” Rogers said. “It’s the familiar first novel pattern, I’m told. I haven’t had a go at it yet. I’ve been away. I’m told some of it is—” He broke off. He reminded Bill Weigand that they had been talking about burglary, not literature. “There is a difference,” Gilbert Rogers added, with perhaps unnecessary firmness.

  Weigand nodded. He asked if Rogers had known Miss Godwin long.

  “About three years,” Rogers said.

  “Well?”

  Rogers lifted his eyebrows. Weigand smiled faintly; he said he was thinking in connection with her possible whereabouts at the moment.

  “Oh,” Rogers said. “Well, she may have picked up and gone anywhere, as I said. If it were summer, I’d suggest the country—she’s got a small place, not much more than a week-end place, up near South Salem. But that’s closed up, now. Of course, she may be around town anywhere—you just started to look today, didn’t you?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “No doubt she’ll turn up at the house. We’ll keep ringing.”

  “If she is in town,” Rogers said, “I can tell you the most likely place to find her—at—” He looked at his watch. It seemed to surprise him. “About six,” he said. “A little over half an hour from now.” He looked pointedly at his desk, which was not clear. “Try the Four Corners. She’ll drop in for a drink, probably. Even if she doesn’t, her crowd will. You know Four Corners?”

  Bill did. He apologized for the time he had taken. Rogers said it was nothing; he rose behind his desk. He was a big man; he might have been an amateur boxer at his university, which, from his speech, Bill Weigand took to have been Harvard. He gave Weigand a hard handshake to remember him by. “Come again any time,” Rogers said. Harvard and Groton, Weigand thought, assuming precedent to be sound. Bill Weigand went from the large building of the Hudson Press and drove down Madison Avenue, and down Fifth, to the Village. He parked his car near the Four Corners Restaurant, and went to a telephone booth in a stationer’s on the corner. He telephoned the Norths’ apartment. Martha was still there. Mrs. North had not returned.

  Bill went to the Four Corners, and into it, and to the handsome oval of the bar. He compared those already there with his memory of the publicity picture Gilbert Rogers had shown him. Hilda Godwin wasn’t at the bar. Probably he was early.

  He ordered scotch on the rocks from the nearest of four bartenders and, when it was poured, said, “Miss Godwin isn’t around?” The bartender looked at a clock. “Little early yet,” he said. “She—” He broke off. He said, “Evening, Professor,” and Bill Weigand turned. Bernard Wilson said, “Evening, Harry” and started toward a group at the end of the bar before he saw Weigand. When he saw him he stopped, looked puzzled for a moment and then said, “Oh. Find her yet?”

  “Not yet,” Bill said. “And you?”

  “No,” Bernard Wilson said. “Not I.” He half raised his hand in salute, and sauntered to join the group. Probably, Bill decided, it was Hilda Godwin’s “crowd.” He looked at it, sipping his drink.

  The term “crowd” exaggerated. There had been four; now there were five. The arrival of Bernard Wilson upset the balance of sexes. The arrival of Wilson would also, in all probability, simplify Weigand’s procedure. He sipped and waited; the thought about square envelopes which contained Voice-Scriber records; of a squarish envelope received by Pamela North and taken with her when she went. Went or, preposterously, was taken? From her own apartment? With no chance to cry out? Bill mentally shook his head.

  Wilson was talking to the two men and two women he had joined. Both of the other men, sitting on bar stools, seemed to be tall men. Both were, Bill guessed, in their thirties. One was blond; he had a long, narrow head, sharp features and thin, expressive lips. The other was a dark man, his face square and ruddy, his shoulders heavy. They sat with the women between them. Nearest the dark man, as if by designed contrast, the woman had long hair, light red, curling to the shoulders of her green dress; nearest the sharp-faced man was a, woman whose hair was gray, but a kind of shining gray, molded in waves to a beautifully shaped head.

  They offered movement when Wilson joined them, but he shook his head. He could not, his attitude indicated, stay; rearrangement would be a waste of time. The bartender brought him a drink he had evidently not needed to order; he drank a third of it and leaned along the bar to talk to the others. As he talked, the others looked at Weigand. The thin man shrugged to something Wilson said. Wilson turned toward Bill and motioned. Carrying his glass, Bill Weigand walked along the oval bar to them.

  “I’ve been telling them about the burglary,” Bernard Wilson said, in his carefully ordered voice. “That you are trying to find Hilda.” He moved one well-shaped, large hand to identify “them.” “They’re all friends of Hilda’s,” he added.

  “So you’re a cop,” the thin-faced man said, a British voice emphasizing, enjoying, familiarity with the quaintness of American argot “I can’t say you look it.” He considered Weigand with a directness more often reserved for the inanimate. “Look like a gent,” he remarked. “Doesn’t he, Maddy?”

  The girl with the reddish hair was a very pretty girl. She looked at Bill Weigand with the knowledge of her prettiness in her eyes.

  “He has to try to be rude,” she told Weigand. “He has to try very hard. Nobody pays any attention, of course.”

  “Darling,” the thin-faced man said, and his flexible mouth smiled, twisted. Its movement was like a wink at Bill Weigand. “It’s really no trouble, y’know.”

  “The speakers,” Bernard Wilson said, “are, in order of appearance, Alec L
yster, who sometimes confuses himself with another Alec, and Miss Madeleine Barclay, who also acts.” He then looked slightly embarrassed. He was afraid, he said, that he didn’t remember the captain’s name. Bill supplied it.

  “He’s investigating the burglary,” Professor Wilson explained. The gray-haired woman joined by nodding her coiffed head.

  “Hilda’s gone south,” the dark man said. “One of those places in Virginia, West Virginia—somewhere like that. Went Sunday.”

  He stopped. He lifted a glass and put it down. Bill Weigand slid onto a stool. He gave attention to the dark man.

  “My name’s Shaw,” he said. “Garnett Shaw.” He indicated the woman with the gray hair—with gray hair and a young face, clean jawline, smooth throat. “Mrs. Shaw. Alfrieda Shaw.” He paused a moment; seemed to be waiting.

  “I’m a sculptor,” Mrs. Shaw said, in a voice as clear as glass. “Garry thinks everybody knows about it, Captain Weigand. Speak your piece, Garry.”

  “No piece,” Garrett Shaw said. His voice was heavy. It almost rumbled. “Hilda had dinner with my wife and me Saturday night. I took her home after.”

  “Her errant footsteps,” Alec Lyster said, in an aside, to nobody. “Shut up, Lyster,” the red-haired girl said. “Let the man talk. Then you talk and then I’ll talk and then—” Alec Lyster looked at her; his mouth winked at her. She quit talking.

  “I’m interested in anything you can tell me, Mrs. Shaw,” Captain Weigand of the New York City police said, in character.

  “If my bright young friends—” Shaw said. “I’ll try to. Not that it’s anything to tell.” He looked at Weigand with sudden curiosity. “Come to think of it,” he said, “haven’t I heard of you? Read about you? Aren’t you a homicide man?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “I am.”

  They all looked at him, then. There was surprise, and enquiry, on five faces.

  “D’you mean something’s wrong with Hilda?” Lyster asked. His voice was quick, sharp; it was as if he had, on the moment, come awake from a contented doze. The others waited. Bill Weigand shook his head.

  “The man who broke into her house was killed sometime Sunday night,” Weigand said. “We’re trying to trace his actions up to the time he was killed. Probably the murder had no connection with the burglary. There’s no reason it should have had. The point it, we don’t know when he broke into the house. It might help to know.”

  “Oh,” Lyster said. “That’s all it is?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “All I know of. Do you mind, Mr. Shaw?”

  Shaw did not mind.

  Hilda Godwin had dined with the Shaws Saturday night. There had been two other couples; the man they had invited for Hilda had, at the last moment, been unable to come. “Chap named Rogers,” Shaw said. “Gilbert Rogers. With her publishers.”

  “I’ve met Mr. Rogers,” Weigand said. He waited.

  Around ten or so, one of the couples had left. “They’ve got kids and the baby sitter was running out,” Shaw said. Half an hour or later, the second couple had left.

  “The three of us sat around and talked until—what time would you say, Frieda?”

  “About midnight,” Alfrieda Shaw said;

  “Just about,” her husband agreed. “So nothing would do but I take her home. The girl’s been all over by herself, but I have to take her from Gramercy Park to Elm Lane.”

  “I thought it would be a nice thing to do,” Alfrieda Shaw said, in her glass-clear voice.

  “For me to do,” Shaw said. “Anyway, I did. Took her home in a cab, helped her out of the cab, spread my coat over a mud puddle—”

  “Really, Garry,” Mrs. Shaw said.

  “—carried her over the threshold, set her down in the hall, helped her off with her coat—”

  “I wager you did, at that,” Alec Lyster said. “You think, Frieda?”

  Alfrieda Shaw was, lightly, sure of it.

  “When you’re all done,” Shaw said, his deep voice rumbling.

  “They’re done, Garry,” Madeline Barclay said. Such bright people.”

  “I intend,” Lyster said, formally, “only the most innocent of malice. I am sure I speak for all of us.”

  Shaw sighed deeply. He waited; he waited a little longer than he needed.

  “Hilda said she had a notion to go south,” Shaw said, then. “Said she’d just had it. Then she said, ‘You know, I think I will. Tomorrow. The Homestead or some place like that.’ I said something or other—probably that it was a good idea, and that I wished Frieda and I could do the same. Then I left.”

  “This was in the hall?” Weigand asked.

  “We may have stepped into the living room,” Shaw said. “The hall’s so small you damn near have to.”

  “And you didn’t see any signs that the place had been broken into?” Weigand asked.

  Shaw shook his square head. “So far as you know, Miss Godwin didn’t?”

  Shaw was sure she hadn’t. She hadn’t, of course, had an opportunity to look around. They were talking; then he left.

  “You didn’t happen to notice whether there was a Voice-Scriber there?” Bill asked. “You know the device I mean?”

  “Yes,” Shaw said. “I didn’t notice one way or another.”

  “Does any of you know where she works?” Bill asked. “I mean—in the living room? Upstairs? I’ve never been in the house, you know.”

  “Ground floor,” Alec Lyster said. “Desk there, typewriter that dropped into the desk, y’know, this dictating thing on a table.”

  “I didn’t see it,” Shaw said. “I didn’t notice one way or the other. If it had been stolen then—it was stolen?”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “—Hilda evidently didn’t notice it while I was there,” Shaw finished. “That’s all I know about it.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Thank you, Mr. Shaw. We’ll try to find Miss Godwin.”

  “I still don’t see—” Shaw began.

  “No,” Bill said. “Well?” He looked around.

  “I think,” Lyster said, “that you have pumped us dry, Captain. Speaking of drought?”

  Bill Weigand thanked him and said, “No.” He had, he added, to be getting along.

  “And so do I,” Wilson said. “So do I.”

  Weigand paid and Bernard Wilson paid. They walked together to the door of the restaurant. Wilson said that he was afraid they hadn’t helped particularly. “You hoped to find Miss Godwin there?” he added, as they stood outside. He had, Bill Weigand said, been told he might.

  “Three evenings out of five, at least,” Wilson said. “Lyster most evenings he’s in town, usually with Madeleine. The Shaws, usually. Your friend Rogers drops in now and then; sometimes brings Hilda.”

  “Not my friend,” Weigand said. “I met him this afternoon. Well—”

  “He’s quite taken with our Hilda, you know,” Wilson said. “But then, so many are. And have been. Well, good evening, Captain.”

  He went off up the street, his topcoat neatly folded over his left arm. Bill Weigand went to his car. In it, he went to his office. He returned to neglected routine; he heard what there was to hear about Harry Eaton, which was considerable, but inconclusive. He had, apparently, been alive and reasonably well as late as Sunday afternoon; he lunched (hamburger and coffee) at a drugstore counter on Bleecker Street. During the late afternoon, he apparently had had visitors. One of them, the couple who had the flat next his thought, had been a woman. They had heard a woman talking, and a man they did not think was Eaton. They had not heard anything that was said.

  There was a report that little Harry had had trouble with his landlord, but the landlord denied this. There was another rumor, harder to come by, more elusive, that he had been having trouble with a man known to be a fence (but not, as yet, provably so known) who, in turn, was believed to be connected with an outfit of heroin dis tributors. That might be interesting, if true.

  Pam North had still not returned to her apartment. The alarm was out fo
r her; the M.P.B. was making special efforts. Bill Weigand swore at that. He gave the Bureau the additional job of finding out, without a public alarm and if it could, where in the mid-south Hilda Godwin had gone.

  She had not returned to her little house. Telephone calls had been made to it from time to time, and had gone unanswered. The patrolman on the beat was keeping an eye on the house, and had not been rewarded.

  Bill Weigand summoned Mullins. He wanted what could be discovered, quietly, about one Alec Lyster, apparently British, and one Garrett Shaw. Both frequenters of the Four Corners in Greenwich Village; one married to a sculptor, apparently well known; the other often with one Madeleine Barclay, apparently an actress. All four friends of Hilda Godwin. He would like to know, also, what could, without disturbing anyone’s serenity, be found out about Professor Bernard Wilson of Dyckman University, and Gilbert Rogers, of the Hudson Press.

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. But he raised heavy eyebrows and waited.

  “To be quite honest, Mullins, I don’t know,” Bill told him. He drummed on his desk with his fingers.

  “Mrs. North’ll be O.K.,” Mullins said. “She always is.”

  “Always has been,” Weigand corrected. “I hope you’re right.”

  Mullins went. Bill Weigand telephoned his wife and said he would be late. After a moment of hesitation, he told her why.

  “Oh—Bill!” Dorian Weigand said. “Not Pam!”

  “She’ll be all right,” Bill said. “She always is.”

  He went out for food he didn’t want.

  V

  Tuesday, 10:40 P.M. to Wednesday 1:25 A.M.

  TWA Flight 36, the San Francisco Sky Chief, banked and turned, dropped toward lighted runways of La Guardia Airport. It touched down and rolled; it turned and taxied back. Gerald North was one of the first out of the Constellation. He found a telephone booth and dialed, and waited. He heard the signal of the telephone ringing. He heard it for a long time, but it did not stop. He dialed another number, and it was quickly answered.

  But Bill Weigand was not there. Mullins was not there. Jerry talked to Sergeant Stein.

  “Nothing yet,” Stein said. “She’ll be all right, Mr. North. We’ll find her.”