Curtain for a Jester Read online

  “I was told—” John Baker said, and spoke uncertainly. Dressed as a man, Pam North thought, he still looked boyish. His face was round, pink from recent shaving. His expression candid. Even if they were the same age, Pam thought, he would for years look younger than Martha Evitts, which was unfair. “I came to see whether—” Baker said doubtfully, and stopped again. “My name’s Baker,” he said, and this with more assurance. “I thought perhaps—”

  “There might be something you could do?” Bill Weigand said. “I don’t know, Mr. Baker. Is there?”

  “I’m sorry,” Baker said. “I don’t suppose so. Captain Weigand?”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “We felt at the place,” Baker said. “That is, I mean Mr. Wilmot’s place. The Emporium, you know?” Weigand nodded. “That someone ought to—well, to see whether there was anything we could do. To help, you know.” He looked expectant, but Weigand waited. “We could hardly believe it when we heard.”

  “No,” Bill said. “How did you hear, Mr. Baker?”

  When Mr. Wilmot did not telephone the Emporium at nine-thirty, which he always did when he was not going in, and still had not called almost two hours later, someone had telephoned the apartment. Mr. Dewsnap.

  Weigand repeated the name, doubt in his tone.

  “Mr. Dewsnap is the manager,” Baker said. “Someone—a policeman, I think—told him what had happened.” He paused. “Was Mr. Wilmot really—murdered?” Baker said then. His tone put marks of quotation around a strange, improbable word.

  “Yes,” Bill said.

  “You don’t know by whom? Why?”

  “Not yet,” Bill said.

  “He was such a jolly sort of man,” Baker said. “Full of fun, you know? It doesn’t seem possible. It really doesn’t, captain. Not to any of us.”

  “It seldom does, Mr. Baker,” Weigand said, and Pam North said, “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Baker?” He looked at her. “We met last night,” Pam said. “At the party. You were dressed up as a little boy and the pretty girl with you—Miss Evans, wasn’t it?—”

  “Miss Evitts,” Baker said.

  “Of course,” Pam said. “As a witch. So—” She paused. She looked at Bill Weigand, who smiled slightly with his eyes, whose eyes said, “Yes, Pam, I remembered.”

  “One of Mr. Wilmot’s jokes,” Baker said. “We—we certainly fell for it, didn’t we?” He smiled, somewhat ruefully; a man remembering when he had been the butt of a famous jest. He sobered. “When you think that all the way home—to Miss Evitts’s, I mean—we were laughing about it.” He shook his head, noting the irony of laughter under such conditions.

  “You took it so well,” Pam told him. “I’m afraid most people—for example Jerry and I—” she indicated Jerry, for the record—“would have been—put out.”

  “Oh,” Baker said, “we both know-knew-Mr. Wilmot. If you knew him, you couldn’t be—put out, as you say. But—this doesn’t help, does it?” The last was to Weigand.

  “Well,” Weigand said, “while we’re on the subject. You and Miss Evitts left the party together? You took her home? When was that, about?”

  “Why—” Baker said, and paused. He looked at Weigand for a second, his face blank. “Oh,” he said. “We left, I’d say, a little after one. You were getting ready to go then, Mrs. North. Wouldn’t you say a little after one?”

  “Yes,” Pam said.

  “We found a cab and I took Martha home,” Baker said. “She lives up near Columbia. It was—oh, almost two when we got there, I think. She lives with two other girls in an apartment, and I went to the door with her. Then I went home. That is, I’m living in a hotel down in the Chelsea area. Convenient to the shop, you know. I went down by subway and I got in—oh, about two-thirty. The clerk will know, because I had to pick up my key.” He stopped. “Is that what you wanted to know, captain?” he said. “You don’t think either of us—?”

  “We have to check on everybody,” Weigand told him. “By the way—Mrs. North has told me about the masquerade costumes you and Miss Evitts wore. She got the impression that you were quite upset about it. Even angry, perhaps. You say you weren’t?”

  “No,” Baker said. “Oh—I was embarrassed. Who wouldn’t be? Perhaps I looked—upset. But that was all over in a minute.”

  “And Miss Evitts?”

  “I told you, we laughed about it afterward.”

  “Mr. Wilmot had told you it was to be a costume party? And suggested what you wear?”

  Baker nodded.

  “He played a lot of jokes,” Baker said. “Had a lot of fun.” He paused. “Never a dull moment,” he added, and Pam North looked at him for an instant with new intentness. But there was no change in the youthful candor of his face.

  Bill Weigand nodded.

  “Eventually,” he said, “we’ll have to dig into everything. Mr. Wilmot’s business, even. Find out all we can about him. About people he knew, people who might have had something against him. About his finances. You don’t know anything, offhand, about his business dealings that might be helpful?”

  Baker shook his head. The Novelty Emporium couldn’t, he thought, have anything to do with Mr. Wilmot’s—murder. Again he used the word with disbelief.

  “As I understand,” Weigand said, “it’s a large shop? Store? Where these—er—novelties are sold? At retail?”

  Baker shook his head, slowly. It was more than that, although it was that, too. The company sold also at wholesale. “We’re jobbers, among other things.” There was a manufacturing section. The company made novelties, from original designs; sold them throughout the country to retail outlets, even to other jobbers. “You’d be surprised at the size of it, actually,” Baker said. “I was when I started.”

  Weigand nodded. He said, “By the way, when was that?”

  Baker had been with the firm only about eight months. He was an auditor. He smiled. “Call it a bookkeeper,” he said.

  “In that job, I’d spot anything—out of the way—quick enough,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you won’t find anything to help you at the business end. It’s all open and above-board. We’ll cooperate in any way, of course but—I’m afraid you’ll waste time, captain.”

  They were used to that, Bill told him. They wasted more time than they saved. But he appreciated Mr. Baker’s opinion.

  “You haven’t come on anything yet, then?” John Baker said. “In his papers here or anything? Nothing to give you a lead?”

  “We’ve just started,” Bill said. “Why, Mr. Baker? You think we will?”

  Baker shook his head. He said he had just wondered. There was a pause. Baker prepared to stand.

  “If there’s anything at all we can do to help,” he said. “All of us in the business. You’ll call on us?”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  Baker did stand up. He did not, however, leave quickly or easily; it appeared he was not one of those who can. He was naive in departure. His apologies for having been there, bothering everybody; for having intruded; for having nothing with which to help—these were numerous, a little bumbling. But he found the door, at last.

  Bill Weigand sat and looked at one of the cats, and did not appear to see it. (The cat looked back, seeing Bill very clearly, possibly seeing through him.) The Norths waited for some little time. Then Bill Weigand said, “Hm-m-m” and after that, “Well.”

  “He was angry,” Pam said then. “And the girl—the girl was hurt. They weren’t laughing.”

  “No?” Bill said. “You may be right.”

  “I kept wondering,” Pam said, “whether he wasn’t—well, a little too good to be true?”

  Bill Weigand half nodded. Then he stood up.

  “We’d better get at it,” he said. “Come on, sergeant.”

  They went. At the door, Bill told the Norths he would be seeing them. He spoke, it seemed to Jerry, a little absently.

  The telephone rang. Pamela answered it obediently, which meant that her thoughts, too, were elsewhere. (The North
who answered the telephone lost a point.) She said, “Oh yes, Mr. Monteath.” She said, after a moment, “Isn’t it?” She listened further. She said, “Why, I think that would be very nice. The Algonquin? In about half an hour?” She listened further. She said, “Thanks for calling,” which was not, for her, a common locution. She replaced the telephone.

  “It’s on the radio,” she said. “Mr. Monteath wants us to have lunch with him. I said we would. All right?”

  “I guess so,” Jerry said. “Why?”

  Pam shrugged slightly. She said Mr. Monteath hadn’t said.

  “Maybe,” Pam said, “he just thinks we’re nice people to have lunch with. Do you suppose that’s it?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jerry told her.

  She nodded.

  “Were you a very close friend of his?” she asked. “Ten years ago, or whenever it was?”

  Jerry shook his head. They had played tennis together a few times, had drinks together. “You met him,” Jerry said.

  “Once,” Pam said. “Perhaps twice. He seems to appreciate us more now, doesn’t he? Do you suppose murder draws people together?”

  Less went on in the penthouse apartment. The body was no longer there; most of the blood was gone from the floor, but in the interstices between the tiles blood darkness remained. Rothman had gone, and the photographers, and the print men. The precinct was gone, except for two uniformed men. The detectives from the First District remained; Sergeant Stein from the Homicide Squad had appeared. He had what there was.

  Item, Sylvester Frank, the butler, was not immediately to be found. But—he had been there that morning. The routine check among tenants on the floor below the penthouse, undertaken without great expectations, had been unexpectedly productive. A woman, reaching out to pick up a newspaper in front of her door, had seen Frank climbing the stairs to the penthouse, as she had seen him on many other mornings. He had looked as he looked on any morning. (Told how this morning had differed from other mornings, she had gasped, turned white.)

  “Frank doesn’t live in,” Stein said. “This place is mostly living room; two bedrooms, two baths, kitchen, no servant’s room. Apparently Frank left after the party last night, went home—he’s got a room on the west side—came back at the usual time. Then, disappeared.”

  “Fire stairs,” Bill said. “I wonder why?”

  Stein could only shrug.

  Item, Martha Evitts, who had been taken up had stayed briefly, had been taken down again—“She looked as if she’d seen a dozen ghosts, the elevator man says”—was also not to be found. She had not gone to her office. She had not gone to her apartment uptown. She was being sought, as was Frank.

  “If she found the body, she didn’t call,” Stein said. “We’ve checked that. Secretive of her.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Non-cooperative.”

  Item, the knife had been Wilmot’s, one of a set designed for various uses in a kitchen, kept in a slotted box on a counter in the kitchen. It was, in length, somewhere between a paring knife and a carving knife. It had a tapering blade and a sharp point; it was a good knife.

  “No trick?” Bill asked, and Stein shook his head. He went to a table and brought the knife and Bill looked at it, finding no trick—finding it English made, hollow ground, a useful knife for a variety of purposes. A set of such knives would, Bill thought, appeal to a man who liked good tools, who was handy with them—who, by extension, might like contrivances. Bill guessed that the kitchen held many useful gadgets, said so, was told it did. That fitted Wilmot well enough, but that was no longer the point. It had not been Wilmot who was handy with his knife.

  Weigand looked around the penthouse, with Stein as guide. The foyer, the big, oblong living room with glass and glass doors on three sides, the two small bedrooms and the two compact baths; the neat laboratory of a kitchen, with an electric oven built into one wall, electric surface units and a refrigerator combined; a garbage disposal unit built into a sink, a dishwasher, full of glasses—all very efficient, all a little “gadgety.” That fitted, also.

  They went out to the terrace, which went around three sides of the penthouse. It was some fifteen feet wide at its widest, which was on the side of the building overlooking the street; narrower on the two other sides. French doors opened on it from all rooms except the baths. The penthouse area comprised only a part of the roof; the remainder, separated from the terrace by a low wall, was merely roof. There was a housing for the elevator machinery and in that there was a small door. Bill looked in. A steel ladder ran down one side of a narrow well, which held steel cables. Presumably, if one went down the ladder, one would find some exit below.

  There was another door, this one into a narrow, sloped-roof shed. Bill opened it. Steep metal stairs ran down to another door—a fire door. This was the topmost entrance to fire stairs, which would, at the bottom, give on the street or on a court from which the street could easily be reached. Sylvester Frank could have used this exit from the roof after his morning visit. As easily, he could have got to the floor below through the foyer and, there, found another door to the fire stairs. Either the ladder through the elevator housing or the fire stairs might provide access to the roof, as well as exit from it. Fire doors can usually be opened from one side—be opened toward escape. Bill looked again at the fire door on the roof. It had knobs on both sides, could be opened by a person standing inside, on the narrow stairs. The roof was, therefore, available to anyone who got himself into the building, which was no chore at all. Mr. Wilmot might easily have entertained the marauder he had, for party purposes, simulated. Well, people had to be able, somehow, to get to the roof of a building. Roofs sprang leaks, for one thing.

  They went back into the penthouse itself.

  “I don’t suppose,” Bill said, “that Wilmot was thoughtful enough to make a list of his party guests?”

  If he had been, they hadn’t found it. There was a desk at one end of the living room; beside it there was a three-drawer filing case, inconspicuously built in. In the wall above the desk, conventionally behind a picture, there was a wall safe. The filing case had been opened; the safe, as yet, had not. A man was on his way for that. Two detectives were going over papers from the filing case, one seated at the desk, with papers piled in front of him; the other, less comfortably, on his knees in front of the case. Weigand walked to them; his eyebrows enquired.

  “Nope,” the man at the desk said. “Nothing that sticks out. Business stuff, mostly. A wad of drawings of machinery or something.”

  “Novelties, probably,” Bill said.

  “Could be,” the detective said, and went on with it.

  “Where,” the uniformed man in the foyer said, loudly, “do you think you’re going, mister?”

  “—be damned,” a slurred voice said. “Had it right, did they? Somebody really got the old buzzard? Old Uncle Buzzard?”

  Bill Weigand moved across the living room quickly. He stood at the door to the foyer.

  A tall, thin young man in a gray suit—a white-faced young man, with disordered black hair—stood facing a policeman. The young man swayed slightly as he stood. He looked as if he might have slept in his gray suit.

  “Old Uncle Buzzard,” the young man said, and it was evident he was drunk. He turned to Weigand, then. “Whata you want?” he said. The policeman looked at Bill Weigand; Weigand shook his head, briefly.

  “Mr. Wilmot was your uncle?” Bill asked, and got “Tha’s right, who’re you?”

  Bill told him.

  “Policeman,” the young man said. He looked at Bill. “Don’ look it,” he said. He swayed further. “Next of kin,” he said. “Pay respects.” He sought to pull himself together. “Clyde Parsons,” he said, and gestured toward himself.

  “Come in,” Bill said, and indicated the policeman’s task. The policeman took Clyde Parsons by the arm. He was shaken off. “Think I can’t walk?” Parsons said. “Think I’m drunk?”

  Bill’s gesture gave instructions. The uniformed man rele
ased Parsons, who could walk, if not steadily. He walked into the living room, he sat down, sprawling a little, in a deep chair. Momentarily, he put both hands to his head. Then he put them on the arms of the chair.

  “Little dizzy for a minute,” he said, and his voice, while still blurred, was steadier. He looked up at Bill Weigand. “All right, I’m drunk,” he said. “So what? Right to be drunk, haven’t I?”

  “If you like,” Bill said.

  “Anyway, he started me off,” Parsons said. “You hear about that?”

  “No,” Bill said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Don’t know whether it’s any of your business, come to think of it,” Parsons said. “Just came around to see whether they had it right. Somebody kill the old boy?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Somebody did, Mr. Parsons. Somebody killed your uncle.”

  “Anybody who knew him,” Parsons said. “Anybody at all. Could have done it myself.” He paused. He put his hands to his head again. “Didn’t, though,” he said. “No use saying I did.”

  Briefly, Bill considered Clyde Parsons. There was no point in a statement; it wouldn’t stick. Mullins loomed near and raised eyebrows, indicated his notebook. Bill shook his head. But still—

  “You were here last night?” Bill said. “At the party your uncle gave?” He paused. Parsons was looking around the room. “Want some coffee?” Bill asked him.

  “Want to sober me up, don’t you?” Parsons said. “Everybody wants to sober the poor guy up. Nobody ever does. Alcoholics Anonish—Anonymous. Everybody. ’Cept old Uncle Buzzard. He thought it was funny.” He considered. “Funny as hell,” he said. His drawn white face was not funny; his tormented dark eyes were not funny. “Six months I went,” he said. “Got the poor damned fool on the wagon, they figured. Forgot good old uncle.” He paused again. “Know what happened?” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Said he was sick,” Parsons said. “Had an attack. Wanted to see me. Make everything up.”

  “When was this?”

  It had been late the afternoon before. Frank had telephoned Parsons at six or thereabouts. “Back from the office,” Clyde Parsons said. “Had a job yesterday. Hell with it.” Frank had said that Byron Wilmot had been suddenly taken ill—very ill. They were afraid it was a heart attack. He wanted to see his nephew that evening, but not immediately. The doctor was with Wilmot then, Frank said. They would know more at ten o’clock, or thereabouts. Parsons was to come then.