Untidy Murder Page 6

  “Flanagan’s all right,” Mullins said once. “I don’t say he ain’t all right, Loot. He sees what’s in front of him.”

  “Maybe this wasn’t in front of him,” Weigand said. “Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be.”

  Mullins said “Yeah” to that. He listened only a moment more. He said, “O.K., Loot. I’ll pick you up.”

  Bill Weigand put the telephone down. In spite of himself, in spite of his inner, bitter certainty that this was not to dissolve happily into harmless tardiness, he listened for footsteps before he again took up the telephone. Jerry North answered this time.

  “Jerry,” Bill said, “I think something’s happened to Dor. I’ve started things moving.”

  “I was afraid,” Jerry North said. “We both were—we’ve been talking. Pam thinks it hooks up with this business—”

  Bill did not wait for him to finish.

  “So do I, now,” he said. “I think she’s got something about the cigarette. Tell her that. And—do you know any of the people at Esprit? Is it your neck of the woods at all?”

  “I didn’t know Wilming,” Jerry said. “I’ve had some dealings with Stanton. About some Esprit stuff we want to put out in an anthology. There’s a chap named Helms I think we met once. Pam thinks we did, anyway. She says sure I remember, because I spent half the evening staring at Mrs. Helms. But I don’t remember.”

  “But not Wilming?”

  “I don’t think so. Neither does Pam. As I said, we’ve been talking. By the way, Stanton’s a fairly tough guy, in some ways.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—he’s tough on publishers, for one thing. He’s tough about Esprit stuff. He’s just—well, a tough guy. All I know about is business, of course. I don’t know how he is personally.”

  “Is he tough with the staff?” Weigand said.

  Jerry North paused a moment.

  “Because he fired Wilming, you mean?” he said, then. “Well—I only know what I hear about him. Maybe he is. He thinks a lot of Esprit—maybe more than of anything else. Or anybody else. But that could be just gossip. Most of it is, probably.”

  “Do me a favor,” Bill said. “You know people who’ll be talking about Wilming. People who knew him, probably. People with theories. Listen. Right?”

  “Of course,” Jerry said. “You do think the two things hook up—Dorian and … this?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “I think it’s funny. Screwy.” He paused. “As Pam does,” he said. “As you do. Listen, tell Pam to guess for me, Jerry. I can use her guesses on this one. Tell her to guess like hell.”

  “Anything—” Jerry said, and let it hang.

  “I know,” Bill said. “I’ll take you up.”

  He put the receiver back in its cradle. Then, simultaneously, the buzzer of the front door sounded and the telephone rang. He took the receiver up, listened, said, “Hold it a minute.” He went over and pushed the wall button which released the downstairs door. He heard that door open, left the apartment door open and went back to the telephone.

  “O.K., Ted,” he said.

  “Nothing from the hospitals,” Cochrane said. “Nobody unidentified in accidents. We’re working on the hacks.”

  “Right,” Bill said. He was about to hang up when Cochrane spoke again.

  “Hold it,” Cochrane said. “We were in luck in the hacks. It looks like she took a Parmalee right in front of Bonwit’s. Driven by a—” He broke off. Bill heard him call to somebody in the office. “Is this a gag?” he called. Bill could not hear the answer. Cochrane came back on. “All right,” he said, “they say it isn’t a gag. Driven by a hackie named Thomas Jefferson. He remembers her pretty well. And—well, Bill, he says he took her to your place. He says she got out of the cab and went up the steps. He watched her because—well, Bill, he says ‘because of them legs.’”

  Mullins came in. He stood by the door and waited.

  “You’re sure she’s not—well, around somewhere?” Ted Cochrane said. You could tell he hated to say it.

  It was half an hour before Bill Weigand and Mullins, working fast, working expertly, were absolutely sure. The apartment itself took only a few minutes. Already, Bill, thinking himself a frightened fool, doing it anyway, had looked in the likely places. Now they looked in the others. Then they went through the four-story building, starting in the basement, where an Italian janitor spluttered indignantly; continuing to the top where the janitor’s pass key let them into a studio apartment with a spreading sky-light. Then they were sure that if Dorian had come to the house in Thirty-seventh Street, she had gone away again.

  They were back in the living room and Mullins looked an enquiry at Bill Weigand. Bill’s face was set in hard lines; he looked older than Mullins had ever seen him. Bill Weigand’s shoulders rose and fell in the tired parody of a shrug. And Mullins spoke slowly.

  “You know what it looks like, Loot,” he said. “It looks like she’s been snatched. You figure it’s that way, Loot?”

  “It could be,” Bill said. His voice was suddenly tired.

  “On account of she knows something about this Wilming case,” Mullins said. “Or—or on account of somebody’s got it in for you, Loot. Somebody you pinned something on. A hood, like—well, like Scratchy Lavery, Loot. Some of Lavery’s boys were pretty sore. You know that.”

  Bill knew it. If some of Lavery’s boys had Dorian.… Bill picked up the telephone, got his own office, got Detective Sergeant Stein in the office. Again he talked fast. Stein said, “I’m sorry as hell, lieutenant,” and then for several minutes he merely listened. When Weigand finished, Stein said, “Right, we’ll round them up and shake it out of them, lieutenant. If they’ve got Mrs. Weigand—” Stein did not finish the sentence. The tone in which he spoke made explicitness unnecessary.

  Weigand and Mullins started, then. But when Mullins was in the outer hall, Bill turned back and took a sheet of paper from the desk and wrote on it, writing large, “Darling—I’ve gone to look for you.” It made no sense to write that; it anticipated a miracle.

  4

  FRIDAY

  7:45 P.M. TO 8:55 P.M.

  Detective Sergeant Flanagan was just going off duty. He looked puzzled when he recognized Bill Weigand, as he went back to the precinct detective room with Weigand and Sergeant Mullins. He spoke, when they got to the room, before Weigand did.

  “Didn’t I see your wife today, lieutenant?” Flanagan asked. “Wasn’t she at this magazine office where—”

  “Right,” Bill said, running over Flanagan’s hesitancy. “She was, sergeant. Now she’s disappeared.”

  Flanagan got the connection. They could see him get it. His eyes narrowed.

  “Wilming killed himself,” Flanagan said. “Jumped out of the window. Landed on the sidewalk twelve stories down.”

  “He landed,” Bill agreed. “Are you sure he jumped?”

  Flanagan’s heavy eyebrows went up. He started to speak, hesitated and then went on.

  “How could I be sure?” he asked. “You know that, lieutenant. I couldn’t be sure unless I was there and saw him. But everything said he did. You know how it is.”

  “Everything?” Weigand said. His voice was insistent.

  “Everything I saw,” Flanagan said. “A man only sees what he sees. You know that. There was nothing against suicide. He was losing his job. His mother, and he was sort of funny about her, died a couple of months ago. It wasn’t a window you would naturally fall out of.” He nodded, still thinking it added up. “You’d have thought so yourself, lieutenant,” he said. “Of course, this makes it different. Now you can look back.”

  Bill Weigand was patient. He said he knew; he said that he was not blaming Flanagan for anything. He said all he wanted was for Flanagan, now things were different—might be different—to look back.

  “You see how it is,” Weigand said. “My wife walks in on this. The same day she disappears. You see how it is.”

  “Sure,” Flanagan said. “She could have see
n something she shouldn’t have seen. Which means Wilming was pushed. And now whoever pushed him is after your wife, to keep her from talking. But if she saw something, why didn’t she tell me?”

  That would be theory, Weigand told him. She might not have realized the importance of what she saw. “Or heard,” he said. The person who pushed Wilming, if he was pushed, might have thought she did realize it, or would when she thought it over. Also, the person who pushed Wilming might merely have thought Dorian saw something, going on the knowledge that there was something to see. It would be a little thing; it would have to be a little thing, since Flanagan did not see it.

  Flanagan shook his head at that.

  “She was there earlier,” he said. “She and this receptionist. The St. John girl. They went in and found the room empty. Maybe it was then she saw something. But if she did she didn’t tell me.”

  Bill tapped on the desk with the fingers of his right hand. One-two-three, one-two-three.

  “If she saw something then, the St. John girl could have seen it too,” he said. “Probably would have seen it too. Right?”

  “You’d think so,” Flanagan said. “It didn’t come out in her story.” He looked at Bill Weigand’s drawn face. “I’m sorry as hell, lieutenant,” he said. “Sorrier, if it was something I missed.”

  Bill shook his head, shaking off the apology. Flanagan couldn’t have known. It looked all right then. It was what they had to do now that counted.

  “Sure,” Flanagan said. “Get hold of the St. John girl. See what she—” He stopped suddenly, in a way that made Bill and Sergeant Mullins look at him, waiting with a new intentness.

  “There was something,” Flanagan said. “I’m trying to remember everything; things that didn’t matter, you know? The St. John girl picked up something. Afterward, before she left the office. First she fainted, then she got up and leaned against the desk, then I went over to the door with Mr. Stanton and she picked up something from the floor beside the desk. I half saw her. You know how you do?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Go ahead, sergeant.”

  Sergeant Flanagan shook his head. There wasn’t anywhere else to go. That was all. She picked up something; he did not see her put it down. He didn’t know what it was.

  “Shape?” Bill said, and Flanagan shook his head. “Color?” Flanagan started to shake his head again, stopped and looked for a moment at nothing. “It could have been blue,” he said then. “I don’t know why I think that, but it could have been.”

  “Large or small?” Weigand said. His voice was insistent.

  “Small, I guess,” Flanagan said. “If it had been big I’d have seen it. It was something she could close up in her hand.”

  “Hell,” Mullins said, “why don’t we ask her?”

  “Right,” Bill said, “we’ll—” But he stopped, because Flanagan was shaking his head.

  “She won’t be home,” he said. “She had a vacation starting today. She’s going to a camp up-State. She was catching a seven o’clock train. Right now, she’d be on it.” He shook his head again. “You know, lieutenant,” he said, “I didn’t have any reason to figure it wasn’t all right.”

  Bill nodded. He cut that loss; his mind went on. They would get the receptionist, the St. John girl, back. But that would take time. They didn’t have time. He drummed on the desk, planning it.

  “I want you to change your report, sergeant,” he said. “Make it a suspicious death. I’ll see O’Malley and make it official. You’ll do that?” Flanagan nodded. “We’ll send—no, we’ll get the St. John girl back here. Tough on her, but I want to talk to her. I’ll put that through. Now we’ll go over to this office. I want to see it. You’re off duty now?”

  “Forget that,” Flanagan said. “I’ll just give the wife a ring.”

  He gave the wife a ring after he found the address of the camp to which Vilma St. John had gone for her vacation. Weigand started the mechanism which would bring Vilma St. John back from grass and sunshine, and dances at the recreation hall in the evenings, to a dusty room and questions about murder. Then the three of them drove in Weigand’s car to the building in which Esprit had offices. There was a place on the sidewalk where sand had been thrown and washed off, and where more sand had been thrown. People had walked over the place half a day, but you could still see its outlines.

  The offices of Esprit were not empty. There was no one in the dimly lighted reception room, but the door was unlocked and all around, in the quiet of an office building at night, there was the sound of a kind of subdued commotion. The sound was made up of typewriters, of feet on floors, of voices. Flanagan started to take them toward one of the doors which led out of the reception room and the door opened and a young man with a very tired face and a sheaf of paper in one hand came out of it. He looked at them, said “Hello” without curiosity and went on across the reception room. He opened the door in the opposite wall and, as he opened it, yelled: “Hey! Frankie!” He closed the door behind him.

  They went down a corridor. In one small room, opening off of it, a young man seemed to be asleep on a red sofa. “You know,” Flanagan said, “it’s funny. That guy was there this noon.” They went on.

  The corner office was dark and empty. They turned on the overhead light, and the room was glaringly bright, but still empty. They stood in the door.

  “That window,” Flanagan said, and pointed straight ahead. The big window was closed now. In the wall on the right there was another window. A desk backed to that window. In the wall on their left—the wall which would be faced by anyone sitting at the desk—there was a door. Weigand indicated it with a nod.

  “Goes into another office,” Flanagan said. “A guy named Helms was there. Wilming’s assistant, but he was going to get Wilming’s job. He didn’t see anything, or hear anything.”

  Weigand’s glance went around the room as he listened, as he nodded to show he listened.

  “They came in this door?” he said, and Flanagan nodded. “Miss St. John first, then my wife. Right?” Flanagan nodded again. “They saw an open window and the room was empty. Miss St. John said—what did she say?”

  “She doesn’t remember exactly. She says she assumed he had gone in to Mr. Helms’s office, because they were always back and forth. Wilming and Helms. She said something like that to Mrs. Weigand, only of course she called her Miss Hunt. She said she’d go get Wilming. But he wasn’t in Helms’s office and hadn’t been. She came back and Mrs. Weigand was looking down and then she heard a siren and Mrs. Weigand said something and then the St. John girl got it. Then she fainted.”

  “That was all?” Weigand said. “She just came in, saw Wilming wasn’t here, thought he was in Helms’s office, went to get him? She didn’t see anything?”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “There was a cigarette,” Weigand said. “Smouldering. Probably Wilming’s cigarette. Right? Where was it?”

  Flanagan pointed to an ash tray on the desk. It was clean, now.

  “Burned down to ash,” he said, “except for a little bit at the end. You could see enough to make out it had been a Fatima. Part of the word was left. It showed up on the paper, you know? Stanton said Wilming always smoked them.”

  “That seemed all right to you?” Weigand asked Flanagan.

  Flanagan looked puzzled. “Did what seem all right?” he said.

  “All of it,” Bill said. “I don’t want to lead you.”

  Flanagan thought. The puzzlement did not leave his face. He nodded at the end.

  “Far as I can see,” he said. “Is there a catch?”

  Bill nodded. He said he thought there was a catch.

  “You’re smoking,” he said. “You decide to jump out a window. What do you do?”

  Flanagan shrugged. You just jumped out, he thought. But Mullins shook his head.

  “Ten to one,” he said, “you put out the cigarette. You push it down in the tray in a kinda—well, kinda hard. Because you’ve made a hell of a decision. You get up
and jump.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “You and Pam North.”

  Mullins said, “Huh?”

  “You think alike,” Weigand told him.

  Mullins said, “Listen, Loot!”

  Flanagan worked it out and looked unhappy.

  “I missed it,” he said.

  Bill Weigand told him it was easy to miss. He said that, even if it had not been missed, it was not conclusive. Nothing they had was really conclusive.

  “But figure it this way,” he said. “You’re sitting at the desk and somebody calls you from the window. He says, ‘Hey, Wilming, here’s something funny. Come over and look.’ Maybe you’re smoking, and maybe you take the cigarette along. But maybe you’ve just taken a drag and propped the cigarette up in the ash tray, and you don’t think about it when you go over. You expect to come back. Only—Wilming didn’t come back.”

  “Well.…” Flanagan said.

  “Right,” Bill said. “It doesn’t prove anything. But it fits better. And—my wife noticed it. She told a friend of hers. I don’t know whether my wife thought it didn’t fit. I don’t think she thought about it. But her friend did.”

  Flanagan was still doubtful. If that was what Mrs. Weigand had seen, there was no sense in trying to keep her quiet. Too many other people had seen it. Any of them might have figured it out.

  “Right,” Bill said. “She saw something else. Where was the St. John girl when she picked something up?”

  Flanagan showed him. Weigand did not move, but he nodded.

  “Probably it didn’t mean anything,” he said. “And anyway we’ll have to ask the girl. It’s gone now. Wherever she put it, it’s gone. They’ve scrubbed up in here, and in the reception room. You noticed?”

  “Yeah,” Mullins said. Flanagan said nothing.

  That was it, then, Bill told them. He’d seen the place. It gave him a starting point. Now they would see people. Mr. Stanton. Mr. Helms. The St. John girl. After that, they would see.

  He went first out of the office and Mullins followed him and Flanagan came last. Weigand led the way, walking rapidly, back toward the reception room. He was about to open the door leading into it when he heard Flanagan speak, behind him.