Murder Is Served Page 5

  The telephone on Jerry North’s desk rang. He said, “Sorry,” to an author important enough to bring him back to the office after lunch on Saturday, and “Yes?” into the telephone. He said, “Put him on” and heard the modulated, slightly professional voice of Professor John Leonard. The modulation seemed a little hurried and Leonard said, “North! It’s gone. Out of my office.”

  Jerry North, who was used to having things come at him suddenly, said, “What?” only once. Then he said, “You mean the paper the girl wrote? The thing we were talking about?”

  “Of course,” Leonard said. “The blue book. It was on my desk, I went to lunch, it was gone. Just like that.”

  “You’ve looked?” Jerry said.

  “I’ve looked. It’s gone.” Leonard gave that a moment to sink in. “It’s the damnedest thing,” he said. “Have you got the copy I made? Did you show it to this Weigand?”

  “I did,” Jerry said. “He kept it, I think.”

  “How did he feel about it?”

  “About as I thought he would,” Jerry said. “That it was—funny. Disturbing. That he couldn’t do anything. Do you think the girl took it?”

  Leonard said that anybody might have taken it. Registration for the spring term had begun, the Extension offices were crowded. It was impossible to tell where everybody went; impossible to lock up the offices of individual faculty members since most of the offices were shared by several professors and so constantly in use. “And crowded,” Leonard said. “Several people standing around in each office, rushing in and out. You know.”

  “Was the girl there?” Jerry asked.

  “Probably,” Leonard said. “The girl, her boyfriend—anybody. Anybody could have walked in, student or not. It’s—it’s like the concourse of Grand Central, for all the check there is. What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I’ll tell Weigand. But I don’t know what we do. Was it by itself?”

  “The blue book? Yes. I’d held it out. I was going to talk to her about it, you know. When I got a chance.” He sighed. “If ever,” he added.

  “I’ll tell Weigand,” Jerry repeated. “I don’t know what he can do.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” Leonard said. “Disturbing.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. There was a short pause.

  “Well, all right,” Leonard said. “I don’t know what we can do, either. But it’s a funny thing.”

  Jerry let Leonard repeat himself, promised to let him know what Weigand said, hung up. I don’t know if it’s as funny as all that, he thought, and turned to the writer, who leaned forward and gave full attention.

  “As I said,” Jerry told him, “we like it. We want to bring it out. There are one or two points—”

  The telephone rang again.

  “Damn,” Jerry said. “Sorry.” He picked up the telephone and said, “Miss Nelson! Please don’t put anybody on for—oh.” He waited a second and said, “Hello, Pam?”

  “Jerry!” Pam North said. “Did you see it? But I can tell you didn’t or you wouldn’t just be sitting there.”

  “I’m—” Jerry said. “What?”

  “It happened,” Pam said. “It’s in the papers. She did do something.”

  Jerry ran the fingers of one hand through his hair.

  “Pam,” he said. “Look, darling. I’m talking to a writer about a—”

  “With a steak knife, apparently,” Pam said. “The one in the professor’s class.”

  “Look,” Jerry said. “What steak knife? In what professor’s class? You mean Leonard’s?”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Not the steak knife. That was in—well, that was in Mr. Mott. Her husband. Don’t you see? The one she hated.” Pam sighed. “Jerry,” she said. “Don’t you ever read the papers?”

  “Mott?” Jerry said. “Look, Pam—what are you talking about. Forget the papers a minute.”

  “Mott,” Pam said, very carefully. “Tony Mott. The Tony Mott. You know. He was killed in a restaurant he owned. Somebody stuck a steak knife in him. Don’t you remember the name of the girl?”

  “Good God!” Jerry said.

  “Of course,” Pam said. “What do we do?”

  “Look,” Jerry said. “Bill won’t miss it. Only—I was just talking to Leonard. The paper she wrote. He says it’s gone. Apparently somebody took it—stole it, really, from his desk. He wanted me to tell Bill.”

  “Did you?”

  “Look,” Jerry said. “I haven’t had a chance yet. I just finished talking to him and you—”

  “Anyway, he’s out on it,” Pam said. “I tried to get him, to be sure he saw it was the same Mrs. Mott. He and Mullins both. Jerry, we’ve got to do something. I mean, Professor Leonard won’t tell Bill about the paper’s being stolen. He’ll leave it to you. And she did it so that it wouldn’t be evidence of—of her state of mind. Because now she can deny that she ever hated Mr. Mott and—”

  “Pam,” Jerry said. “Pam! Wait a minute! To start with, we don’t even know there’s any connection. Suppose her name is Mrs. Mott. Suppose Tony Mott is killed. We don’t know—”

  “Maybe you don’t,” Pam said. “I do. Of course it is. She is the Mrs. Mott. And so she hated him and—at least, I should think anybody married to Tony Mott would have hated him, from the things he did—”

  “Pam,” Jerry said. “You don’t know this.”

  “It’s obvious.”

  Jerry hesitated a moment.

  “It’s likely,” he said. “I’ll admit that.”

  “And we have to find Bill and be sure he hasn’t forgotten the girl’s name and tell him about the blue book. You see that?”

  Jerry paused a little longer. Before him he could see it all again—the nervous strain, the dashing about, the probability that somebody would get hurt in the end.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said. “All right—I’ll try to get in touch with Bill. But Pam—you stay home. Don’t—”

  “Oh,” Pam said. “I’m not home, Jerry. I’m downstairs, in a booth.”

  Jerry North said, “Oh.”

  “Will you come down?” Pam said. “Or shall I come up? Because I think we ought to go to Bill’s office. You know how they are on the telephone. Because if we don’t say it’s important, they don’t pay any attention, and if we say it is, there’s always—well, do you want to explain it to the inspector? From the beginning?”

  “I—” Jerry began, and gave it up. “I’ll be down,” he said. “I suppose we have to. Only—” He let that hang; the string of hesitation, of hope, frayed and broke. “I’ll be down,” he said.

  He cradled the telephone and looked at the waiting writer without seeing him. Then he did see him.

  “Look, Ken,” said Jerry to the author, “I guess we’ve about finished, haven’t we? That was an urgent call and—”

  4

  SATURDAY, 2:50 P.M. TO 4:40 P.M.

  She had left as soon as she knew he was dead. She had almost run at first but then, before she went out into the street, she had paused and taken deep breaths—one, two, three—until her nerves were quieter, until she could walk, bent a little against the wind, her fur coat hugging her slim body closely, the cold stinging her face, and show nothing. That had been all, at first, she did not know for how long. It had been enough. Merely walking away had been enough, fighting the wind, feeling that with each step it was farther behind her, that she was getting away from it. But it did not remain enough. It was too lonely, and it was too terrifying to be alone.

  She had tried to get Weldon, but the landlady had said he was not in, that she did not know where he was, that she did not know when he would be in. Peggy Mott had come out of the telephone booth and stood for a moment holding the door of the booth, as if for support—as if she did not want to leave the shelter of the booth. She thought that Weldon probably would be at Dyckman, arranging his classes for the next term and, at first, she thought she would go there and find him and tell him what had happened. Only probably, by now, he knew
what had happened; probably everybody knew what had happened. The radio would have told. “We interrupt this program for a news bulletin.” Or would it be that important? And the newspapers would have told. Because by that time, they would surely have found Tony.

  She started toward the subway and then turned away, and walked with the wind behind her down a street. She realized she was walking east on Forty-second Street, and realized that she must, earlier, have walked blindly west, always against the wind, without knowing where she went or why, and then have turned and walked south, finally, toward the subway and then, when she decided not to go to Dyckman after all, east again. She could not go to Dyckman, because they would be expecting her there, looking for her there. She did not doubt they would be looking for her; that would be part of the plan.

  She came to the Grand Central and had walked into it before she realized that they would be looking for her there, too. They always looked, watched, in railroad stations—in railroad stations, at ferries, at bus terminals, because flight led through such places. She had read about that; she had thought how frightening it would be to be trying to run away and to run to first one hole, and find it blocked, and then to another, and another, and to find them all blocked. She had seen a rat do that once, in a place she was staying when she had an engagement in a summer theater, and the rat had seemed to have many holes and all of them had been blocked by the people who were chasing the rat. The rat had run by her in its flight and it had been squealing and she had covered her face and made a kind of moaning sound, but not because she was afraid of the rat, although she was. She had shared the rat’s fear, had moaned with its fear. She moaned now; there was a kind of whimper in her mind.

  But she thought it would make them recognize her if she turned, halfway down the ramp into Grand Central, and went back to Forty-second Street. So she went on, a slender girl, rather over the average height, with very wide eyes, set wide apart in her head. And she walked as she had trained herself to walk, erect, not letting her body sway, keeping her head up. People looked at her, as they always did, and she did not let herself look away. She walked into the upper level concourse and across it, toward the Lexington Avenue side, moving among the people, showing nothing. But there was still a whimper of fear in her mind.

  That must have been, she thought now, looking at the dimly lighted clock, almost two hours ago. She had left the office before noon, she thought—a minute or two before noon. She had arrived earlier than she planned, earlier than she had been supposed to, and she had stayed only minutes. Two or three, she thought—three or four. Then she had almost run down the corridor and then walked along the street, and somehow an hour had disappeared, because she was sure that it had been around one o’clock when she had come to the newsreel theater in the Grand Central and had gone into it. She had been there since, and she did not have any other plans.

  She had not seen, coherently, anything on the screen. She had realized that people were laughing around her, at a cartoon, but when she looked at the screen the moving light on it meant nothing. Once some people around her had hissed when a man on the screen was speaking, and others had applauded. She realized that that had happened several times, as the continuous sequence on the screen repeated itself. And sometimes she had looked at the screen, trying to make it arrest her attention, but she had never been able to watch, or to listen, for more than a moment.

  But it was not that she was thinking, thinking coherently, planning. She tried that, too. But her mind kept slipping away, slipping away to the rat running from hole to closed-up hole, to the telephone ringing in her apartment and Tony’s voice telling her to come, to blood on the desk and the rat, and the blood, and her hatred, and to what she had written. And to Weldon, who seemed now hopelessly beyond her reach. Now it was almost three o’clock, and she had been in the newsreel theater for something like two hours, and a man on the screen was sitting at a table and speaking in a language she did not understand. The man seemed to be angry, and once he pounded on the table.

  They would know now about what she had written, as well as about Tony. They would know that she had been there, because that would not have been forgotten in the planning. They would be looking for her, they would be stopping up the holes.

  She tried to remember just what she had written, and found she could not. How much did I say, she thought; how much did I tell? Can they tell from what I wrote who I was thinking of, who I was hating? That I was hating a man whose blood was on a desk, in whose neck there was a knife? That I was talking—to myself, to no one—about killing a man who has been killed? What did I write, and why did I write at all? To free myself, to discharge myself? To—to share the feeling, somehow, with someone else? With Mr. Leonard, who looked at me so often; who looked at me that way?

  Almost at once, after she had turned the blue book in, she had wished that she had not written what she had. She had been embarrassed when she thought of it and it had not helped when Weldon, being told of what she had done, had said, “For God’s sake, Peg!” in a voice of angry unbelief. She had told him in the elevator and, but only after she had spoken, had realized that others in the class were in the car and could hear her—that Cecily was there, and Randall Cooper and the older woman who thought, who could be felt thinking, that Peggy Mott used a make-up too smooth, too finished, for a college classroom, or for any place.

  “I wrote about hatred, Wel,” she had said. “How I hated—you know. About how much fun it would be to stick a knife in him and twist it.” And then Weldon, suddenly angry, had said, “For God’s sake, Peg!” Everybody would remember what she had said; even Weldon would be forced to admit she had said it. And Cecily would not need to be forced.

  The audience around Peggy Mott laughed because a cartooned wolf had been blown through a roof and was using its ears in a futile effort to fly above a cloud.

  “Right, Mullins,” Lieutenant William Weigand said. “Let them in.” Mullins said, “O.K., Loot.”

  “And Mullins,” Bill Weigand said, “quit calling this place the Male Ox, huh?”

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “It’s spelled that way, just about. Why do they spell it that way, then?”

  Bill merely shook his head.

  “Let ’em in, Sergeant,” he said.

  Bill had taken over André Maillaux’s office. They came in; they filled it. They had press cards in their hats and some of them were in a great hurry. In the office they all started to talk. Those who were not asking questions told those who were to stow it, and give the lieutenant a chance. They quieted and waited.

  “I can’t give you much you haven’t got,” Bill said. “Somebody stuck a knife in Tony Mott, severed an artery and he died with his blood all over his desk. You know about Mott. We don’t know who did it. It was done, apparently, a few minutes before noon—the M.E.’s guess—by somebody who stood in front of him and used his right hand or stood behind him and either used his left hand or a backhand. Nothing about the wound to indicate which. Mott was sitting down—or standing in front of his chair, and slumped into it—apparently didn’t suspect anything. Maillaux found the body a little after noon. According to the girl in the office, at the switchboard, nobody went past her after Mott came in until Maillaux went to the door, called ‘Hiyah, Tony’ or something as he opened it and then yelled when he saw the body. There are a couple of other doors—one to his office, one to a corridor, so that doesn’t prove much.”

  “Fingerprints?” the World-Telegram wanted to know.

  Weigand shook his head.

  “Wiped,” he said. “The knife, that is. There are a lot of prints in the office, of course. Mott’s. Maillaux’s. A good many unidentified, of course. Mott’s on the telephone—and Maillaux’s because he used it to telephone us. Unfortunate, but he doesn’t seem to have covered anything except Mott’s own. Mott used the telephone a couple of times, taking incoming calls. He didn’t make any calls himself.”

  “What about the knife?” the Herald Tribune wanted to kno
w. “We got it it was a steak knife.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Wooden-handled, thin, sharp blade. The name of the restaurant stenciled on it—burned in.”

  “They never gave me a knife like that,” the Sun said. “I ate here a few times. Steak, too. Just an ordinary, pretty sharp knife.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “An improvement. New knives. Mott had ordered them himself, if you want a little irony. They came in yesterday, somebody took one in to Mott to look at, apparently Mott left it on his desk, handy for somebody.”

  “Is that particularly ironical?” the Times asked.

  Weigand shrugged. “Up to you boys,” he said. “I’ve seen you go further. However—”

  “And you’re getting nowhere, I gather?” That was the Journal-American, sounding cross. Bill Weigand was unperturbed.

  “Do you?” he said. “I presume we’ll get somewhere. We usually do, you know. We haven’t locked anybody up yet, if that’s what you mean.” He looked at his watch. “It happened about three hours ago,” he told them. “There’s been a lot to do. A lot’s been done.”

  “Suspects?” the Journal-American said, still cross. “Who’re your suspects?”

  “No comment,” Weigand told him, and smiled.

  “No suspects,” the Journal-American said. “You admit it.”

  Bill merely shrugged at that.

  “That’s the way I play it,” the Journal-American said, and looked around at the others. “How about you guys?”

  “What the hell?” the Post said. “What’s biting you, Schmidt? You can’t lay it on the Commies.”

  “The trouble with you pinks is that you don’t—” Schmidt began, and was urged to skip it. Weigand waited, smiling faintly, indicating that it was not his fight.

  “How did Mott fit into this deal?” the Times said, waving around. “The set-up?”