Murder within Murder Page 5

  Weigand got the West Forty-eighth Street police station on the telephone. The precinct would be glad to send a man around. If they found Gallahady they would bring him in.

  “Irish, sounds like,” O’Callahan, on the desk, told Bill Weigand. “Irish, is he?”

  “He could be,” Bill said. He smiled slightly to himself. “I’ve sometimes thought he must have been,” Weigand said. “An extremist, it always seemed to me.”

  “Huh?” O’Callahan said.

  Weigand told him to skip it. Weigand said he had been talking to himself. He replaced the telephone, looked at it and heard it ring. He took it up and said, “Homicide. Weigand speaking.”

  “Hello, Loot,” Mullins said. “Look, Loot. I’m up here at the girl’s room. The girl who cleaned up Miss Gipson’s room.”

  “The room of the girl who cleaned up Miss Gipson’s room,” Bill Weigand said. “The pen of my aunt.”

  “What?” Mullins said. “I don’t get it, Loot.”

  “I know where you are,” Bill said. “I told you to go there. What does she say?”

  “Nothing,” Mullins said. “She ain’t here.”

  “Why?” Weigand said. “I thought she wasn’t due at the hotel until ten. She’s probably out to breakfast.”

  “I got here at seven,” Mullins said. “She wasn’t here then. She wasn’t here last night, from the looks of things. The bed, you know, Loot.”

  Weigand said he knew.

  “And,” Mullins said, “her clothes ain’t here, either. Anyway, not enough clothes. Of course, maybe she didn’t have many clothes.”

  “Listen,” Bill said. “You mean she’s skipped?”

  Wasn’t that, Mullins said, what he was telling the Loot? It looked like she had skipped.

  “Or of course,” Mullins added, in a conversational tone, “somebody could have bumped her off. Naturally.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. He looked at his desk, and was displeased by it. Outside it looked like a pleasant morning.

  “Hold it,” Weigand told Mullins. “I’m coming up.”

  Florence Adams, who had been a maid at the Holborn Annex, had lived in a rooming house a few blocks from Columbia University—lived in a small room which looked unlived in. There was a worn black coat hanging in the tiny, low closet which opened off the room; on the cheap dresser there were traces of powder and in the wastebasket there were several wads of used cleansing tissue. Weigand sniffed at the cleansing tissue, which smelled of cold cream; he sniffed the coat, which smelled of dust. There was nothing in the room which smelled of the Fleur de Something or Other which had been so quietly insistent in Miss Gipson’s room. And there was nothing in the room to tell him anything about Florence Adams, or to tell him where she had gone.

  There was, Mullins agreed, nothing to suggest that she had met with ill fortune, including the very ill fortune of being bumped off.

  “Only,” Mullins said, “people are. We ought to know that, Loot. Particularly when they lend keys to murderers to have copies made. It ain’t healthy.” Mullins paused. “Or, of course,” he said, “she could be the one we’re looking for. There’s always that, too.”

  There was, Weigand agreed. Certainly she was one of the ones they were looking for now. His eyes kept searching the room, looking for secrets in it. He knelt and looked under the bed, and saw only dust. He turned back the covers. The sheets had been used for a week, he guessed; perhaps for two weeks. Near the bed there was a shelf which might have contained books and which now contained nothing. As far as he could see, the room—possibly with a change of sheets—was ready for the next tenant who passed that way.

  It was odd, he thought suddenly, how easy it was to overlook the obvious. Yesterday’s newspaper was not only dead; apparently it was invisible. Or had been invisible. Now it was visible enough, lying on the seat of the straight chair by the dusty window. He picked it up. It was The Daily News of that morning, turned open at the second page. There was a very short story there—a paragraph inserted for the record. The top line of the head read: “Poisoned in Library.” The bank amplified: “Middle-aged Woman dies in Reading Room.” The story added little to the headline, except the possibility that the woman may have been an Amelia Gipson, living at the Holborn Annex and that her death apparently was suicide.

  A police slip at Headquarters had given them that much to make an edition with—to make it on the outside chance that it might not be suicide, because poison in the public library had the charm of novelty. The story had been written, evidently, before an astute detective, making a routine check of a suspicious death, had come upon the last line which Miss Gipson had written and decided it might be a case for Homicide. Later editions of The News had had more. The story had flowered, not only in The News but in The Mirror. It had made the split page in The Herald Tribune and had got a two-column head, below the fold, of course, in The Times. It would be doing a great deal better in the afternoons, Weigand thought.

  Florence Adams had not waited its flowering. She had seen enough in the edition of The News on street sale by midnight to satisfy her curiosity. You could read that much easily; Weigand hoped he read it rightly. Because if he did, Florence Adams knew something—had done something—which led her into flight. It was always helpful when people began to run. It was revealing. And they were almost always caught.

  Bill Weigand found a telephone and talked to the Holborn Annex. Florence Adams was not there; she was not due there for better than an hour.

  “By the way,” the desk clerk said, “one of your men is here, Lieutenant. Detective O’Connor? He’s been talking to one of the other maids—the one on the early trick. Do you want to talk to him?”

  Weigand thought he did. He listened to O’Connor, said, “Right,” and hung up.

  “O’Connor says the other girl—a woman of about sixty, by the way—says Florence never used any perfume that she could smell,” Weigand told Mullins. “And he got a description of Florence for us.”

  Twenty minutes later the description was on the teletype. It went into police stations throughout New York and New Jersey; it went into Connecticut and across into Pennsylvania; it stuttered out of machines in Massachusetts.

  “Wanted for questioning,” it said. “Florence Adams; about 24, black hair, sallow complexion; about 115 pounds; five feet three; may have been wearing brown wool two piece dress, beige stockings, black shoes. Sometimes wears glasses with white metal rims. Believed myopic. No coloring on fingernails. Identifiable New York City accent. This woman is wanted for questioning in connection Gipson murder. Please hold.”

  By the time an operator at Headquarters was fingering the description out on the teletype, Weigand and Mullins were back in Weigand’s office. And they were waiting for Mr. Gallahady, who had been sitting placidly in his room in the West Fifties, reading PM. He had not seemed surprised when a detective from the precinct said that there were one or two points they would like cleared up, and would he mind being run downtown to offices of detectives in charge of the case. Gallahady had said he did not mind in the least; he had been very cheerful about it. He had also agreed that his name was Philip Spencer, confirming the statement of his landlady.

  Bill Weigand did not wait long. They brought Gallahady-Spencer in to him and, invited, Gallahady-Spencer sat down. Mullins, at a nod from Weigand, got a notebook ready.

  “By the way,” Weigand said, “why Gallahady?”

  The man who sat, easily and with apparent confidence, was in his middle forties. He needed a shave and a haircut; he needed a new suit and new shoes; he needed, Weigand thought suddenly, a new life. There was a laxness about his face, a kind of hopeless softness, and he smelled a little as if he had been drinking a good deal for a long time.

  But nothing in his manner apologized for any of this; nothing in his manner admitted any of this. If he had fought it once, he was no longer fighting it.

  “A jest,” he said, answering Bill Weigand’s question. “Possibly pedantic. I borrowed it from—
”

  Bill’s nod stopped him. Bill said he knew where the name had been borrowed from. He perceived the jest. Spencer raised his eyebrows as he listened; he seemed surprised.

  “Aside from Caxton’s little error,” Weigand said, “why any false name? Why not your own name, Mr. Spencer?”

  Spencer said it was a whim. He said he didn’t know why. He pointed out that he had, in any event, given his correct address.

  “Probably,” Bill told him, “because it is difficult to think of a convincing address in a city you don’t know very well—when you are talking to men who know it very well.” And Spencer could skip the whim part of it.

  “Do you know, Lieutenant, I think you may be quite right about the address business,” Spencer said. He spoke with a kind of detached interest. “I wondered why I didn’t give a fictitious address. I think you have explained it.”

  Bill held him to it. It wasn’t a whim, he pointed out again. He pointed out, also, that they were investigating a case of murder.

  “Why,” Bill said, “did you go to the trouble to hide your identity, Mr. Spencer? Has your identity something to do with the case?”

  Spencer hesitated, clearly making up his mind what to say. Then he said that Weigand might think his identity had something to do with the case.

  “I knew Amelia,” he said. “Naturally, I say I had nothing to do with her taking off. But you would expect me to say that.”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. He waited.

  “It was a very unfortunate coincidence, for me,” Spencer said. “Very unfortunate. I might have been almost any other place. I might have been in the South Reading Room instead of the North Reading Room. It would have made no difference to Amelia, believe me. But oh, the difference to me.”

  Weigand waited.

  “I wish you would believe it was entirely a coincidence,” Spencer said. He spoke almost wistfully.

  Still Weigand said nothing. Spencer looked at the detective lieutenant’s face and then he shrugged. They might as well have it, he told them, and waited until Mullins was ready.

  “Name,” he said. “Philip Spencer. With one ‘1.’ Philip Spencer, Ph.D. Age, 43. Occupation, former associate professor of English at Ward College, Rushton, Indiana. Dismissed for unbecoming conduct with one of the students—one of the girls. Because a spiteful little fool told a lot of lies to a spiteful old bitch who—” He broke off. He smiled, and the smile was contorted. He began again.

  “Too much coincidence,” he said. “Even for me. And yet it’s true. The girl, who I swear misunderstood something which was entirely innocent, went to Miss Amelia Gipson—Gipson with a p, mind you—who was head of the Latin Department and also a sort of unofficial censor of morals. And Amelia went to the president of the school, who was a friend of mine but not—well, not that good a friend. Understandable—the school was all he had. It had to be above suspicion. Well—I wasn’t. So he had to let me go. He was as, quiet about it as he could be—as decent. But Amelia saw the word got around.”

  He paused and looked off at nothing.

  “Schools are touchy,” he said. “Big schools and little schools. Faculty members of girls’ colleges who are suspected of—molesting—their charges don’t find it easy to get jobs. And teachers in their forties—just good enough teachers—don’t find it easy to get other jobs.”

  He looked at Mullins. He asked Mullins if he was getting it all. Mullins said, “Yeah.”

  “I was married,” he said. “My wife was not in good health. Possibly that is one of the reasons I had remained at Ward; because of the security. My wife died about six months after I—left the faculty. Our living conditions weren’t what they had been and, as I said, she was not in good health. I have been somewhat—somewhat detached from life ever since. I had even almost forgotten Amelia until I saw her at the library last night. You will hardly believe that, but it’s true. I heard she had also left the faculty. It seems there were—other cases. Rather like mine, except that in the end she seems to have been imagining them. She made one or two mistakes—imagined one or two impossibilities, I suppose—and the head suggested that she leave.”

  Spencer was silent for a moment, regarding the past as if it were in the room.

  “There was a suggestion that I might return to Ward after Amelia left,” he said, at length, quietly. “It seemed rather late. Rather too late.”

  He stopped speaking again and this time he did not resume. Weigand waited and after a time asked whether that was all of it.

  “That’s all of it,” Spencer said. “I was there. You could make a motive out of what I’ve told you. There isn’t anything else. I can’t prove I didn’t give her whatever she died of. I don’t even know what it was. I didn’t see anything suspicious, so I can’t put you on a trail.”

  This time it was Weigand who established the silence and let it lie in the office. And it was Spencer who suddenly leaned forward in his chair.

  “Well, Lieutenant?” he said.

  Bill Weigand looked at him, with no particular expression, and shook his head.

  “It’s not that easy, Mr. Spencer,” he said. “You can see that. You know what the truth is, so far as you are concerned. You have the advantage of me. I don’t know. All I know is what you say.”

  “Which,” Spencer said, “you see no reason to believe.”

  It was not a question. But Bill Weigand said it was not even that easy.

  “Which,” he said, “I have no grounds to form an opinion on. At the moment, it is equally possible you are telling the truth and lying. There is nothing impossible in your story, as you know. Since you are not, so far as I can see, a fool, there wouldn’t be anything impossible in the story. I’ll have to look into it.”

  “And let me know,” Spencer finished.

  He need have no doubt of that, Weigand promised him, and there was a certain grimness in his promise. Meanwhile, Mr. Spencer would—

  “Hold myself available,” Spencer finished. “Or do you hold me available?”

  Weigand smiled pleasantly, and told him the former, by all means.

  “Of course,” he said, “we might take a hand if it became necessary. I assume it won’t. I assume we’ll be able to find you at your room when we want you.”

  Spencer stood up. Weigand looked up at him, saying nothing. Spencer hesitated a moment, as if he were about to say more, and then said, “Well, all right” in an uncertain fashion, and then, “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Spencer,” Weigand said, politely. “Probably I’ll be seeing you.”

  Spencer did not look happy. He went. Mullins, looking after him, shook his head.

  “O’Malley,” Mullins said, “ain’t going to like it, Loot. Next best to suicide, this guy Spencer is. Opportunity, motive, present on the scene, false name—hell, he’s made for it.”

  Bill said he gathered Mullins wasn’t buying Spencer’s story. Mullins shrugged. He said it wasn’t him, it was the inspector. He looked at Weigand.

  “How about you, Loot?” he said.

  Weigand’s fingers were drumming gently on his desk. He did not look up. For a moment he did not speak. Then he said he didn’t like coincidences.

  “It needs a lot of believing, Spencer’s story,” he said. “But, as I told him, it’s possible. And we can’t hang him on it. O’Malley couldn’t, I couldn’t. The commissioner couldn’t or the D.A., so we waits and sees.”

  Again Mullins waited. He saw Weigand look at the watch on his wrist, and then up at the clock on the wall. Weigand said they ought to be hearing from Stein. Mullins looked enquiring. Weigand said Stein was at the lawyers’ office.

  “Williams, Franke and something or other,” he said. “Miss Gipson’s attorneys. Attorneys for the estate she was handling. The people who know—”

  The telephone on his desk rang and he spoke into it. He said, “All right, Stein, come along up.” He replaced the receiver and said, “Speaking of coincidences.”

  They waited, looking at the door
, and Detective Sergeant Stein came in. He was a trim, slender man in his thirties, with dark, absorbed eyes. He sat down where Spencer had sat. He said he had seen a man named Mason. He said Mason had given him the dope.

  Amelia Gipson was the daughter of Alfred Gipson, Stein said, checking with his notes as he talked. Alfred Gipson had died, leaving a good deal of money, in 1901. He had left it to his wife in trust and, on her death two years later, it had been divided between the two children, Amelia and Alfred Gipson, Jr. Each had received around three hundred thousand dollars. Amelia had put hers, for the most part, in bonds; a good deal of it in government bonds. She had lived on the interest; until recently, when taxes went up and interest down, she had done a little better than live on the interest. But say she left about the same sum she had inherited.

  “To?” Weigand said.

  Stein said he was coming to that. He said it wasn’t, he thought, the most important thing. But she had left the bulk of it to a nephew and a niece, in equal shares. To get back, he said.

  Alfred, Jr., Amelia’s brother, had been about ten years older than Amelia—he had been born in 1883, and had been twenty when his mother died. And at twenty, apparently, he had started making money. He had made it, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly, but almost always consistently, until he died in 1940. He had also found time to marry and beget two children. His wife died when her daughter was born in 1922, which made the daughter twenty-three. The son was two years older. That was John. The girl was Nora. But no longer Nora Gipson. Now Nora Frost, wife of Major Kennet Frost.