Death of a Tall Man Read online

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is always difficult. I realize that.”

  She tried to smile. She made a bad job of it.

  “Have you any ideas about it, Miss Spencer?” he said. “About who might have wanted the doctor dead?”

  She shook her head. He watched her. He did not think she hesitated before she shook her head, but it was a possibility.

  “The back door,” he said. “What you call the ‘back door.’ Is it locked?”

  She nodded. Then she spoke, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “It has—whatever you call them,” she said. “A snap lock. It is locked from outside after you close it. Unless you set it before you go out.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “And so far as you know,” he said next, “no one had tripped the lock—set the catch so the door could be opened from outside without a key—at any time today?”

  She shook her head. Then she looked doubtful.

  “Anyone could have,” she said. “The doctor when he went out to lunch. Anyone. There’s no way of telling unless you look. The key works just the same.”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “I realize that, Miss Spencer.” He paused a moment. “Do you know of anything around the office that is like a knob—a smooth knob? Or a small, heavy ball? Of metal, perhaps?”

  She looked puzzled. Then, as she understood, she said, “oh,” in a voice which was only a breath. He watched her eyes. He thought they reflected a thought; rejected it—or kept it hidden.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t know of anything like that. Unless—no, I don’t know of anything.”

  “Unless what?” he said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “How large would it be?”

  Bill Weigand told her it would fit in a hand. Comfortably. So that the fingers could curl most of the way around it. That, he said, was what he thought.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know anything like that.”

  He thanked her again and asked her to stay. In one of the examining rooms, he suggested.

  “Will the lab be all right?” she said. “There—there are some things to do. I may as well do them.”

  The lab would be all right, he told her. In an hour or so, he hoped, she could go home.

  They watched her cross the reception room and go through the door at its end. Then Pam looked at Bill and waited, and after a moment—during which he looked at the closed door—he looked at her. He asked her what it was.

  “She was in love with him,” Pam said. “With the doctor. Wasn’t she?”

  Bill Weigand nodded slowly. He said he thought she was.

  “And now,” he said, “do we quote Oscar Wilde, in unison?”

  “About each man, only it would be a woman, and the thing he loves?” Pam said. “And all that? I wouldn’t, even if I thought so. Because I don’t think it’s particularly true. I think it’s just something somebody says in a poem. Don’t you?”

  As a general rule, Bill said, he thought it was something somebody said in a poem. In this instance—

  “Oh, in this instance,” Pam said, as if it were another thing entirely, “I don’t know, Bill. I don’t even think I know. But she does know about a knob, I think. Or a ball you could hold in your hand, with your fingers curled—” She stopped. She didn’t like the idea. It was an ugly picture. “Could it have been that, Bill? Would that have done it?”

  Bill Weigand raised his shoulders and let them drop. They wanted something heavy and spherical. Or half a sphere. They wanted something smooth. A ball on the end of a stick, by preference. Otherwise a ball held in the hand. In which case, it would need to be fairly heavy, or the hand which held it—the hand and the arm—uncommonly strong.

  “Or the skull thin,” Pam said.

  Bill Weigand agreed. It could be that way, of course. But thin skulls left murder to chance; they were something murder could not count on. There was no way, he thought, to tell the relative thickness of a skull by looking at a head. Only if it had been broken before, and mended, and so been examined by men competent to tell—He broke off and nodded, more or less to himself. And while a physician finding a skull thinner and more brittle than the ordinary, might not tell an ordinary patient—or would he?—he would be rather more likely to tell another doctor. Who, in turn, might mention it, as an interesting medical idiosyncrasy, to someone else. Weigand shrugged again. This was speculation with no basis. His head gestured to Stein, who came from the doorway to the examining corridor.

  “The other girl,” Weigand told him. “The kid.”

  Stein brought her out. It took him longer than they had expected, and, standing behind her, Stein raised his eyebrows to Weigand. It meant he had something to tell, but that it would keep.

  The girl was about five feet four, Weigand guessed. She would weigh a hundred and ten, or a little more. She was very young; her hair hung to her shoulders in soft waves. When she walked, she neither swayed nor moved in that forced staccato which sometimes denied, by suppressing, undulation. Her forehead and the bridge of her nose—a straight nose, not too small, giving character to her face—were slightly sunburned. And she had been crying.

  She was Deborah Brooks, twenty years old; she lived with another girl in an apartment on Madison Avenue. A one-room apartment, Bill Weigand guessed. When he asked her where she lived, she began to cry a little. Sobs did not tear at her, as they had at Grace Spencer; her eyes filled and overflowed and filled again, quietly.

  “Really,” she said, “I live—I lived—with Andy. In North Salem. Since father died. That’s almost three years. And it was more home than anything else.”

  “Dr. Gordon?” Bill said. He spoke gently. His tone enquired.

  It took a while, but she explained. Her father had been a very old friend of Dr. Andrew Gordon; years ago, her father and mother had been friends of the Gordons. Years ago. Bill Weigand looked puzzled and the girl saw it. Her mind worked under the smoothly flowing hair, behind the long-lashed brown eyes. “Not Eve,” she said. “His first wife—Sally. Years ago.” And years ago her mother had died. Her father had died a little over three years ago and the Andrew Gordons—the present Andrew Gordons—had, in a fashion, adopted her. The families had always been close; they lived neighbors at North Salem—“next door,” Deborah said. She had been left alone at seventeen; entirely alone. And Andy had asked her to come and live with them. She had. And then, when she had begun to talk about doing something, Andrew Gordon had said that, if she liked, she could be his receptionist. Until—

  She stopped.

  “Until what?” Bill said.

  “Oh,” she said, “until I decided I wanted to do something else. There wasn’t anything decided on.”

  But that was not, Bill Weigand thought, what she had intended to say. He waited a second.

  “Of course,” she said, “I’m engaged to Dan. But there isn’t anything definite. Not really.”

  It occurred to Bill that, for some reason, she had not meant to tell him that—and had then decided that she had better tell him. He repeated the name. “Dan?”

  “Dan Gordon,” she said. “The boy—I mean the man—who was by my desk when you came in.”

  “The doctor’s son?” Weigand asked.

  Her eyes were dry, now, but they were still shining. Perhaps they did when she thought of Dan Gordon, Weigand thought. She nodded an answer to his question. Then, suddenly, her eyes clouded.

  “He isn’t really—” she began, and stopped. Bill waited. He thought she was worried about something.

  “Yes?” he said, when she did not go on.

  “I was going to say, he isn’t really as—as bad-tempered as he sounds,” she said. “It’s because—” Then she stopped again. After a moment, Bill said, rather idly, that he didn’t know how Dan Gordon sounded. He looked at Stein, and Stein nodded quickly. So that was it.

  “I assume,” Bill said, “that he said something in front of Sergeant Stein when he asked you to come here. Right? And that you’re—laying
a backfire?”

  She looked puzzled for a moment. Backfire meant something a motor did, evidently. She decided not to bother with it. She looked up at him, her eyes wide open.

  “People misunderstand Dan,” she said. “That’s all. The sergeant may have—”

  Weigand cut through it, this time. He spoke to Sergeant Stein. “What did he say, Sergeant?” Weigand wanted to know. His voice was crisp.

  “He said: ‘Damn it all, Debbie, I told you I wouldn’t stand for it!’” Stein told Weigand. “He was angry. At least, he sounded angry.”

  Weigand turned to the girl. He did not need to put his question into words.

  “It wasn’t anything,” she said. “He’s—he’s worried and unhappy. He didn’t know the sergeant was there. It didn’t mean anything.” Weigand waited. “It was just about—about my getting another job,” she said. “He said he wouldn’t stand for it. He wasn’t angry; just emphatic. Dad left me some money and so that’s all right, and Dan doesn’t want me to work. That’s all.”

  She spoke more quickly than she had before. She spoke as if there were a hurry to get it said. And she was unconvincing. There could be no doubt that she was unconvincing.

  But Bill Weigand did not meet the issue. He merely nodded, as if it were now all quite clear, and took her through her day. The times she gave coincided with those given by Grace Spencer. She had had a quick lunch at a drugstore counter between about twelve twenty and ten minutes of one.

  “Alone?” Weigand said.

  She shook her head, hesitated a moment, said Dan was with her. He had met her in the building lobby and had gone to lunch with her. He had not returned to the office. She had left him in the lobby two or three minutes before she got back to the office. Before she left, she had seen Dr. Gordon only momentarily. She had gone to the bathroom to “freshen up” before she went to lunch, but she had not gone into the examining-room area at any time that day—except that she had come through it when she arrived in the morning. When she returned from lunch, she had come in through the waiting-room door, as she usually did when the doctor was working.

  Weigand shifted his questions. When had Mrs. Gordon—the young, blonde Mrs. Gordon—come to the office?

  “Eve,” Deborah Brooks said. “Evelyn. She used to be Evelyn Carr.” She said this as if it might mean something, hesitating after it. It meant nothing. “She came a few minutes after Grace telephoned,” Deborah said. “For the police. And—we had to tell her. And she made a little sound and fainted. She came to once, in about ten minutes, and then the other policemen came and she fainted again.”

  It had hit her very hard, Weigand suggested, with no comment in his voice.

  “I guess so,” the girl said. She strengthened it. “Of course,” she said.

  “And the other man,” Weigand said. “The older man. Who is he?”

  He was Nickerson Smith. He was Dan Gordon’s uncle. Grace Spencer had telephoned for him after she had called the police.

  “Actually,” Deborah Brooks said, “I hardly know him. He was never at North Salem. I don’t think he was. The others didn’t see much of him.”

  “You hadn’t met him before?” Weigand suggested. She hesitated; she didn’t think she had. She might have, but if so he had made no particular impression. He had arrived a few moments before the first of the police; he had said—“oh, what people usually say—how shocking it was.” Since Evelyn Gordon was unconscious, he had said these things generally, to all of them; perhaps most to Dan.

  Bill Weigand got this much, hesitated a moment, told the girl there was nothing more for the moment.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “you can go, if you like.”

  She shook her head. She said that, if it would be all right, she’d like to wait for Dan. He nodded to that and watched her get up from the desk and go toward the doorway leading to the examining-room corridor. Then his head summoned Stein. Stein was to get this uncle, this Nickerson Smith. Stein went for Smith.

  “And she’s in love with the son,” Pam North said. “And—is afraid about him.”

  “Or for him,” Bill said. “You saw that. It wasn’t her getting a job he was angry about. It was something else.”

  “Yes,” Pam said. “Oh, yes.”

  Then the door at the far end of the long room opened and Grace Spencer came back. She came back quickly. Weigand turned to her. She was no longer shaken; her face was unsmiling and the eyes were dark and, somehow, dulled. But she was in control again. She was only halfway down the room when she spoke, quickly.

  “Lieutenant,” she said. “Where were his glasses?”

  Bill raised eyebrows at her, as she came on toward them.

  “The doctor,” she said. “He always wore glasses. But they weren’t on—on the body. Had they fallen off and been broken?”

  Weigand remembered the scene; he built it back into his mind. It did not include glasses, or any obvious fragments of glasses. He made a picture in his mind of the lifted head, when the assistant medical examiner had raised it. There had been no glasses. He turned to Mullins, but Mullins was already on his way. It took him only a minute. He came back shaking his head.

  “Nope,” Mullins said. “No glasses. On the floor—on the desk. No pieces of glasses.”

  “In the desk?” Weigand suggested. Grace Spencer shook her head at that. And Mullins said, “Huh-uh, Loot.” Grace said, “He wouldn’t have taken them off; he never did.”

  So now they wanted a murderer and a pair of glasses. Nickerson Smith came through the door, with Sergeant Stein behind him. Weigand nodded abstractedly, and indicated the chair at the desk. Grace Spencer stood looking at Nickerson Smith, who looked sad. Smith said, slowly, heavily, “Well, Nurse?”—but it was neither question nor statement. The words merely filled a silence.

  “In just a moment, Mr. Smith,” Bill said. Then he turned to Grace Spencer. He thanked her.

  “There was something else,” she said. “Something I forgot. It was nothing. I suppose. I forgot to tell you one of the patients came out after the doctor did, and while I was getting my coat.”

  “Yes?” Weigand said.

  “Out of the sixth room,” the nurse said. “He came out into the corridor by my desk, hesitated a moment, and then went out the back door.”

  Bill thought a moment.

  “Was that the way the others went?” he asked. “After the doctor had finished with them.”

  “Yes,” Grace said. “It wasn’t important, I knew. But it was in that period you wanted me to be exact about and it was something I forgot.”

  Weigand said he understood. He said he was glad she had remembered it, even if it wasn’t important. He said they wanted to get everything, no matter how small. His tone let her go. She had half turned, when Pam North spoke.

  “When you saw Dr. Gordon leaving,” Pam said. “Coming out of the sixth room and getting his hat to go to lunch. Was he just as he always was?”

  Grace Spencer looked at her.

  “I mean,” Pam said, “did he seem nervous? Or frightened? Or anything—as a man would who was going to be murdered?”

  Grace looked at her again. She looked at Bill.

  “Well,” Bill said, “did he? Was there anything out of the ordinary? Even any very little thing?”

  “Why—no,” Grace said. “I don’t remember anything. I see what you mean.” She looked at Pam. “I guess I do,” she said.

  “Strained,” Pam said. “As if something were wrong. Did his face show anything? Or did he—oh, move differently. As if he were nervous or—or worried?” She looked at Grace. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know whether there was anything. Or what it would be. But was he different? As if—oh, say, he’d got a telephone call in his office just before he started the examinations. A call that worried him. Say—oh, say somebody called him up and said ‘I just saw your wife having lunch with that other man.’ I don’t mean she was, of course. I mean, just something like that. Or ‘They’ve found out. What are you
going to do now?’ Or anything.”

  She stopped and waited. Grace looked at her. There was a faint line between her eyes.

  “By the way,” Bill said, “could he have got such a call? Without its going through Miss Brooks’s desk?”

  “Oh, yes,” Grace said. She spoke abstractedly, as if she were answering the easier question first. “He had a direct wire, of course. With an unlisted number. He could have got a call.”

  “Without your hearing it?” Bill asked.

  She said yes, again, still in the abstracted tone. She said the whole office had been built to suppress sound. Particularly if the private telephone rang once, and was quickly answered, she would not have heard it. Or it would not have registered.

  “About the other,” she said. “I do see what you mean.” This was to Pam North. “I—I think he looked just about as always. Unless—” She broke off and looked over Pam’s head at nothing. Pam waited. After a moment she spoke.

  “There was something?” she said.

  There was a little pause. Then, very slowly—and not quite certainly—Grace shook her head.

  “I thought—” she began, and then she stopped. “But I really can’t remember anything. It’s just—” She stopped again. Pam started to speak, but stopped when Bill shook his head at her, very gently. Then she nodded at him.

  He means if we go on we’ll—set up something, Pam thought. Build up something. Whether it’s there or not. Because she’s upset and she might begin to think something up without knowing it. Like thinking you’ve forgotten to lock a door when you haven’t or like Jerry’s turning off the oil stove in the country that time, and then thinking he hadn’t, and driving back miles. And Bill’s right, probably. Only—

  “There may be nothing,” Bill said. “There’s no reason—no necessary reason—why there should be anything, Miss Spencer. Don’t try to force it. But it might help if you—if you let your mind make a picture of Dr. Gordon as you saw him that last time. It might help.”