Murder within Murder Page 6

  “Air Force major,” Stein said. “He’s been in the Pacific. But he got back Stateside yesterday, Mason thinks. They expect him in New York today some time. Everybody’s all steamed up—or everybody was yesterday. The aunt’s death—made a difference, Mason supposes, to get back.”

  Alfred Gipson, who had dropped the junior when his father died, had brought up the children with some advice from his sister, who, however, had apparently exercised a rather distant supervision, except in the summers, when she had joined the family at a place they had in Maine. She and the children, with enough servants, had spent most summers there when John and Nora were growing up, and Alfred had come up for long weekends and sometimes for a week or two at a time.

  Alfred Gipson had had almost a year’s warning of his death. He had drawn up his will when John was nineteen and Nora seventeen. He left his money—which ran to about a million and a half after taxes—to his sister in trust for the children, with the proviso that it was to be divided between them when Nora was twenty-five. Stein paused and looked up.

  “Or,” he said, “upon the death of Amelia Gipson, whichever should occur first.”

  Weigand nodded slowly.

  “So the children cut up a million and a half,” he said. “Plus Amelia’s share.”

  “Less tax,” Stein said.

  “Less tax,” Bill Weigand agreed. “Still all right, I should think. The next question—are the children hard up?”

  Mason said not, Stein told him. Major Frost had some money—not the same kind of money, but some.

  “And John’s probably in the Army,” Weigand said. “Or the Navy?”

  Stein shook his head.

  “Apparently not,” he said. “John’s a chemist—for his age, Mason thinks a pretty important chemist. Too important to get killed, unless he blows himself up. Mason seemed to think there was a pretty good chance he would, although the stuff he’s working on is all very secret. Has been right along. Mason thinks now it may have had something to do with the atomic bombs, but he still doesn’t know. And John’s still working at it. Up in Connecticut somewhere, apparently a good way from other people except the people he’s working with. Only he’s in town now.”

  “Why?” Weigand wanted to know.

  Stein shrugged. He said he had asked Mason. He said Mason didn’t know.

  “Mason says if anybody knows, it’s Backley,” Stein said. “Backley is another member of the firm. He’s out of town, but’s expected back this evening. Mason says Backley is the man who has really handled the Gipson affairs and had most of the personal contacts with them. He says we’ll want to talk to Backley.”

  Weigand nodded. He said they would.

  “And,” he said, “with the children.” He tapped his desk gently. “Rather soon,” he added.

  5

  WEDNESDAY, 10:20 A.M. TO 1:45 P.M.

  Amelia Gipson had completed research into three murder cases before she provided one. The results lay on Pamela North’s desk in neat typescript. They were summaries; the skeletons of old tragedies. The one uppermost was headed: “Notes on the Joyce Wentworth Murder for Mr. Hill.” Mr. Hill was the writer who would put the intangible flesh of words on the skeleton of fact Miss Gipson had provided. It was cut to Mr. Hill’s taste, was the Wentworth murder. It was unsolved and meaningless; it piqued the curiosity which it so little satisfied. It would give Mr. Hill room to turn around in, which was what Mr. Hill liked. His own series, “Fancies in Death,” presented—some suggested more than anything else—the spectacle of Mr. Hill turning around. The whimsically macabre was Mr. Hill’s dish.

  With the Wentworth case, Pam North decided, Mr. Hill could do practically anything—hint at things most strange and wonderful. Nobody was ever going to call him to account, setting cold fact against his artful imagining. There was very little cold fact.

  The coal of Pam’s cigarette, which was held in the hand against which she rested her cheek as she read, nestled in her hair. There was a faint, acrid scent of burning hair. Pam sniffed, said, “Oh, not again” aloud to herself and brushed at her hair violently. She got up and looked at it in a mirror and said, without surprise, “Damn.” She went back to the script.

  Nobody knew who had killed Joyce Wentworth, or why she had been killed. It was likely, unless Mr. Hill could dream up a solution, that nobody would ever know either of these facts. Joyce Wentworth had been a tall, slender girl with a thin, sculptured face and pale red hair. She had earned her living by wearing clothes which looked on her as they would never look on anyone else—by walking, with a faint and detached smile on her really lovely face, through the aisles of one of the big Fifth Avenue stores. Sometimes, although it might be eleven in the morning, she wore evening dress; sometimes, although it might be August, she wore furs; often she wore suits and street dresses, but always it was possible to tell that she was not merely a customer, but a dream provided by the management. Women who had rather more than Joyce Wentworth’s figure, although not always so judiciously arranged, sometimes identified themselves with the dream and purchased the evening dresses, the furs, the coats and suits and street dresses which she made resplendent. And often they wondered, afterward, what it was that had gone wrong between dream and realization.

  Joyce Wentworth had been wearing her own clothes, which were merely clothes and not creations, when she had been killed. She had been walking from the bus stop nearest her home in the Murray Hill section—a one-room-and-bath home, quite in proportion to her salary—and it had been not quite dark on a winter’s afternoon. It was assumed she was walking home; she had been talking to one of the salesgirls at the store on the bus, and had said she was going home.

  That was in 1942—December 11, 1942—and the streets were partly lighted but not light enough. Apparently somebody had hidden in the shadow of a building entrance, let the girl pass and then stepped up behind her and stuck a kitchen knife in her back. Whoever it was had left the knife there and walked away. The girl had managed to walk almost a quarter of a block before she fell. She was still alive when she was found, about ten minutes later. She had died in an ambulance and had never said anything to anyone.

  It was, as one newspaper writer had pointed out, a perfect murder. Miss Gipson had quoted a sentence or two from the newspaper story in her notes. “This,” the newspaper specialist in crime had written, “is the way to commit murder if you want to murder. This crime has classic simplicity. Overtake your victim on a quiet street, stab or bludgeon or throttle, walk away. Complication may trap you—leave booby traps, intricate time tables, alibis—to the writers of mysteries. Waylay, strike and walk away. The chance is good that you will be safe. If you have no motive, you are almost certain to be safe.”

  The murderer of Joyce Wentworth, at any rate, had been safe. He was safe today. He had dropped nothing; he had left no fingerprints. There was nothing the police could find in the girl’s past to give motive for her death. The police had hinted at a jealous lover; they could produce no lover, jealous or satisfied. They had sought a triangle, but Joyce Wentworth’s life had been, so far as they could discover, a straight line—a line leading from a small town in Indiana to death in East Thirty-sixth Street.

  The very simplicity of the case—its starkness—had, coupled with the girl’s quite striking beauty, given the murder celebrity. A great deal had been written about it in 1942; it had since then become a reference point in all surveys of murder in America. Now Mr. Hill was to do it for, presumably, all time.

  “With curlicues,” Pam North said to herself.

  She laid the typescript face down and thought it over. That was the task she had set herself. She had told Jerry so at breakfast, which was rather later than usual; she had said that Bill was obviously going to work with Miss Gipson’s family, because he assumed the solution of her murder lay in that direction. Or with Helen Burt, whoever she might turn out to be.

  “So,” Pam said, “obviously we’ve got to see if it was something she found out because she was working
for you. And that will be in her notes, if anywhere.”

  It was not obvious to Jerry, holding his head, which ached, that they had to see anything. He said he had seen enough already.

  “Stars,” Pam said. “I know. It’s dreadful, Jerry. But after all, it’s your responsibility.”

  With that, also, Jerry was out of accord. Miss Amelia Gipson was his responsibility only on payday.

  “Employee’s compensation,” Pam said. “Or insurance. It’s a state law. Just as if she had slipped on a rug!”

  There was nothing in the state law, Jerry assured her, which made an employer liable for the murder of any of his employees. He looked thoughtful.

  “Anyway,” he said, “off the premises.”

  In that case, Pam said, the obligation was all the more pressing, being moral. She looked at Jerry with interested expectancy, waiting obviously for an answer to that one. Jerry looked somewhat puzzled and ran his right hand through his hair.

  “Look,” he said, “it isn’t like tripping on a rug. She didn’t fall over anything.”

  Pam shook her head. She said that was precisely the point. She said she thought Amelia Gipson had fallen over something.

  “Something dangerous,” she said. “In looking up the old cases. She solved something and the murderer didn’t like it.” Jerry started to speak. “And I do remember what Bill said,” Pam went on. “But I still think it’s possible. Didn’t Poe?”

  “Didn’t Poe what,” Jerry enquired, incautiously.

  “Work out a case the police couldn’t solve,” Pam said.

  “Make a story of it?”

  That had been fiction, Jerry pointed out. There was no evidence Poe was right. He had a theory, like anyone else; being a man of genius, his theory had been arresting and persuasive. But there was nothing to indicate that it had been right.

  “After all,” Jerry said, “nobody killed Poe.”

  “You’re getting off the subject,” Pam said. “Because your head aches, probably. We were talking about Miss Gipson, whom somebody did kill. We’re not trying to solve Poe’s death.”

  Jerry ran a hand through his hair again and smiled suddenly. He said he didn’t mind if Pam went through the notes Miss Gipson had made. He said he knew she was going to.

  “And,” Pam said, “see the writers. Because you say Miss Gipson did. Maybe it was one of them, of course.”

  “Listen,” Gerald North told her, “of all the quiet, peaceable, homebodies, writers of mystery stories.…” he broke off.

  “All right,” he said. “She did see them. Hill, Mrs. Abernathy, the Munroes, Jimmy Robinson. To see if they had any special angles they wanted covered. I suggested it. Robinson is doing the Purdy case; you’ll find the others on the notes. And now give me one good reason you should go to see them.”

  “She did,” Pam said. “Whatever she did while she was alive is interesting now because she’s dead. Obviously.”

  Gerald smiled at her contentedly. The Munroes lived in Albany, he pointed out. Did she plan to go to Albany? And Jimmy Robinson had picked up his typewriter and gone South, because he wanted to give cold weather good and early clearance. And he had not yet sent the office his new address.

  There remained Mr. Hill and Mrs. Abernathy, Pam pointed out. And Albany was not impossible, if it proved necessary. The chances were, anyway, that it would all be in the notes.

  She was less sure of that, now, having read the notes on the Joyce Wentworth case. If Amelia Gipson had solved that one, she had not hinted at the solution here. Or it was a very evasive hint, too obscure for Pam’s detection. She picked up the next of the completed cases.

  It was more complex and older. In 1928, a very prosperous family living on a Hudson River estate had been almost wiped out by typhoid fever—typhoid of peculiar, deadly virulence. Agatha Fleming had caught it first, and before she died her husband, Timothy, was violently ill. They had been the old people; Timothy, at seventy-five, had lived only a day or two. Then their elder daughter had become ill and she, too, had died, although after a more protracted illness. The family physician had been frightened by them and called for help. Help had not saved two more of the Flemings—John, who was in his fifties, and Florence, a year or two younger. Florence’s husband, however, had recovered after some weeks. The only members of the household, except the servants, to escape entirely were the youngest daughter, Helen, and her husband, Dr. Thomas Merton.

  The county, and then the state, authorities sought the source of the infection and failed to find it. And then other authorities, noting that the disease had been oddly selective, assailing only Flemings and leaving others in the house unscathed, and observing that Mrs. Helen Merton now inherited the Fleming fortune, found considerable interest in Dr. Merton’s work as a bacteriologist. They also found typhoid cultures—very virulent typhoid cultures—in his laboratory.

  The case against Dr. Merton had been, at best, a little speculative. He had, certainly, means and opportunity; it could easily be argued that he had motive. But it was not certain that there had been any crime. He was indicted; he was tried and the trial was long and spectacularly attracted attention. But the jury had not agreed. He was tried again, not for so long a time and with rather less attention from the newspapers, and again the jury failed to reach a decision. (It was reported, however, to have stood nine to three for acquittal.) The state had given it up, then, and the County Medical Association received Dr. Merton back into membership. But his wife had divorced him, after a suitable interval, and the university with which he was connected, after a suitable pause to uphold appearances, had decided not to renew his contract. Dr. Merton had fallen on evil days, which was lamentable if he had not, as the prosecution argued, mixed his typhoid cultures into food consumed by various members of the family.

  This case, Pam North decided, was intricate enough. She read Miss Gipson’s thorough précis several times. It was clear and detailed; it did not seem, however, to contain any information which, possessed by Miss Gipson, would endanger her life.

  Of course, Pam thought, she needn’t have written it down. If she found out something—or deduced something—she wouldn’t necessarily have put it into notes for—she looked at the first page of the manuscript—Mrs. Abernathy. She might have decided to tell Mrs. Abernathy—or someone else! Pam thought for a moment. “The murderer,” she said, aloud this time. “That’s what she would do, I should think. Being the kind of person she apparently was. She’d have told the murderer and.…”

  Now Pam North’s mind stopped suddenly and then started up again, faster than ever. Because she saw a coincidence which might be more; because here, in this account of a crime almost twenty years buried, there was a hint, however faint, of modernity.

  “Of course,” Pam said, “it’s a very common name. There must be thousands around. I wonder how old she is?”

  Pam North got a sheet of paper and a pencil and began to figure. The answer came out several ways, as answers did when Pam North added to them. But finally she came out with a figure that was, she was pretty sure, right within a year or two. She folded the sheet of paper and stuck it in a pigeonhole. Now she would have to get another figure and see if the two matched.

  Pam started to get up and go about other things, which would involve Bill Weigand, but she was stern with herself. The way to do it, she decided, was to be thorough. She still had another case to go through, hunch or no hunch.

  Because, of course, that’s all it is, Pam told herself. If that.

  The third case which Miss Gipson had completed was no longer a mystery; it had, indeed, been a mystery for only a few hours. Then the police had solved it, to the satisfaction of all but Clara Bright and Thomas Judson, who, a little more than a year after they had killed Clara’s husband, died within minutes of each other in Sing Sing Prison. It was difficult, looking at the facts which Miss Gipson had set down with detachment—and somehow a hinted suggestion of disapproval—to see why the Bright-Judson case ever created the sensation it ha
d at the time or why, now, it was thought appropriate to include it in the annals of crime.

  Clara Bright and Thomas Judson had been lovers; from the testimony at the trial, they had rather sensationally been lovers. They had killed Henry Bright because he might interfere with their love, although there was little to indicate that he had in fact interfered at all aggressively. Or they had killed Henry Bright because his life was insured for a hundred thousand dollars. Or both. Pam, reading Miss Gipson’s summary a second time, thought that Clara had been more interested in the money—and Thomas just possibly more interested in Clara. He had seemed, at any rate, almost pathetically willing to fall into a plan which was almost certainly hers and involved running Bright down with a tractor and, eventually, crushing him against a stone wall. Sordid, unquestionably, Pam decided.

  She was struck more than ever on second reading by the attitude which Amelia Gipson had, perhaps unwittingly, displayed toward the whole matter. It was not clear that Miss Gipson was revolted, or even that she was sickened, although the case might revolt or sicken almost anyone. It was more that Miss Gipson disapproved; she seemed, Pam thought, to disapprove of the sexual irregularity involved almost more than she did of the murder. Reading the script, Pam North could imagine that Miss Gipson had washed her hands as she finished each sentence of her notes.

  “The evidence showed that, for almost a year before the crime, Clara Bright and Thomas Judson had been involved in a degraded love affair, with the attendant weakening of moral fiber,” Pam read. Her eyes widened slightly. She wondered how Miss Gipson knew that there had been an attendant weakening of moral fibre; how she knew that the love affair had been “degraded.”

  Excessive, maybe, Pam thought. She remembered some of the testimony which had been rather guardedly hinted at in the newspapers. She remembered that she was not then of an age which, in the opinion of her mother, made such reading appropriate and that she had sometimes been put to considerable trouble to get the full story, which The New York Times published so extensively under demure headlines. Physical, undoubtedly, she added to herself. But why degraded?