Murder Out of Turn Read online

  7

  SUNDAY

  11:45 A.M. TO 1:10 P.M.

  The two detectives, with Heimrich doing most of the talking, started their questioning in the Norths’ living-room and allowed the Norths to remain, although Heimrich looked rather doubtful when this was decided and pointed out that he planned to do the talking. They thought of rounding everybody up for a general interrogation, and abandoned that plan. Instead, the various people who had been at the Fullers’ party, and the half-dozen who had not, were severally summoned to the Norths’ cabin by troopers, talked to and sent home.

  The Fullers came first and, separately, outlined their day. It turned out to be a day characteristic of many. They had driven up to camp the evening before, had a few drinks with the Norths that evening and slept late. Jane Fuller had cooked the breakfast, the Fullers had eaten it, Ben Fuller had washed up. They had cleaned the cabin and filled the lamps and then had driven, together, to Danbury to lay in liquor and other supplies for the party. They had got in a set of tennis early in the afternoon, while the light was still bad for the tournament. Then they had watched the mixed double finals, stopped at the Norths’ for drinks afterward, had a light dinner and then had their party which lasted until the body of Helen Wilson had been found. After that, as their guardian trooper could testify, they had talked a while and gone to bed. Neither knew any motive anyone might have for killing Helen Wilson; neither could cite a specific motive for the murder of Jean Corbin, but both agreed, when Weigand asked them, that the second death was less surprising than the first.

  Mrs. Evelyn Abel had gone home after the tournament match, although her husband had stopped at Van Horst’s with some others for a drink. She had been feeling headachy all day and had taken some aspirin and lain down. She had felt better in the evening and had gone to the party with her husband and had been just about to go home when Helen Wilson’s body had been found. She had been out of the cabin once during the party, but she could only guess that the time was a little before midnight.

  “I went to—” she said, and stopped.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “We’ve learned that the cabins haven’t indoor toilet facilities, Mrs. Abel.”

  “Well,” she said, “that was it. That’s the only time I was out.”

  She had liked Helen Wilson.

  “And Jean Corbin?” Weigand asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Evelyn Abel said, very brightly, very quickly. “She was a charming girl.”

  “So—” Heimrich said, and thanked her.

  Dr. Abel was precise of speech and thought, and his account of their day paralleled that of his wife, except that he had stopped at Van Horst’s for a drink after the tennis and gone home to find Mrs. Abel lying down. He had been out of the Fuller cabin once or twice during the party, “for obvious reasons,” he added, but could not guess about the time. He had known Helen Wilson only slightly.

  “And Miss Corbin?” Weigand broke in.

  “Yes,” he said, “I knew her rather better. I had taken her to lunch in town once or twice.”

  “That was all?” Weigand said.

  “Certainly.” Dr. Abel seemed surprised. Then he smiled, a little frostily.

  “Were you led to believe there was more?” he asked. He seemed amused. He looked at the Norths, sitting side by side on the couch, and his smile did not lose its frost. Mrs. North flushed and started to speak.

  “Why—” she said, but Weigand motioned her to quiet and then she said: “Ouch!

  “Don’t pinch me,” she said, indignantly, to Mr. North. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  Dr. Abel, sitting in angular ease in a chair near the fireplace, seemed to be enjoying something. When he spoke, enjoyment leaked from his voice, although his words were commonplace enough.

  “You gentlemen will not, I am sure, be influenced by gossip,” he said. “Particularly when you can prove nothing.”

  “So,” Heimrich said. “That will be all, thank you, Professor.”

  Abel was a tall, thin man when he stood, and there was detached assurance in his manner.

  “I wish you luck, gentlemen,” he said, and went out of the cabin, squinting against the sun.

  “Listen!” said Mrs. North. “He’s pulling wool. Jean Corbin was making a play for him, whatever he says. And Evelyn Abel knew it, whatever she says. Did you notice the way she acted?”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “We noticed it. But you mustn’t break in, Pam.”

  Mrs. North said, a little indignantly, that she hadn’t been going to.

  “But just the same,” she said, “you ought to watch that man. He’d just as soon kill anybody as not, if they got in his way, or bothered him. He’d just—brush them off.”

  Heimrich and Weigand looked at each other and after a while Weigand nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think that’s quite possibly true, in a sense. Don’t you?”

  “So—” Heimrich said. “So.”

  He sent a trooper for Dorian Hunt, and Weigand felt a kind of eagerness which surprised him. Dorian came after a little and stood for just a moment framed by the sunlight in the door. She looked at the detectives dispassionately, without friendliness. She smiled at the Norths, faintly, briefly, and sat where Weigand motioned her to sit. The motion of her sitting was smooth and fluid. She waited, unhurried and alert. She shook her head when Weigand offered her a cigarette, and sat waiting.

  She sat quietly, for the most part, with brown legs crossed and one foot swinging. The short skirt of her dark green frock was only a subterfuge of a skirt, falling open as she sat, to reveal creased green shorts under it. She was a little paler than she had been the day before, Weigand thought, and there were faint freckles on her cheekbones. Her eyes could not, obviously, really have a greenish tint—that must be a reflection from her dress. But there was, as he had remembered, red in her hair when the sun caught it. The sun caught it now, streaming through the door behind her. And there was something about her which made Weigand feel that he had seen her before, under different circumstances and far from Lone Lake. But he could not remember what it was; possibly, he thought, with a sudden start, he had only wanted to see her before.

  She had come up the night before, by a late train with Helen Wilson. That morning, after breakfast, she had gone for a walk, alone, and then she had sat on the Wilson porch and talked with Helen and Arthur Kennedy before lunch. It had been a late lunch and afterward they had watched the tennis most of the afternoon.

  “Except when I was up here,” she said. Later they had had dinner—Helen and her mother, Arthur Kennedy and Thelma Smith, who had come up that morning and been met at the train by Helen and Kennedy. Then she had gone to the party with the others, except Mrs. Wilson.

  “Now,” said Heimrich, “can you remember anything specific about the party? How long Helen was there, for example; when you first missed her? Did you leave the house yourself, by the way?”

  “Yes,” Dorian said. “I left once, I think, I don’t know what time. Helen was there when I came back, I know, and a little later she was dancing and passed near and smiled at me. But I can’t remember times.” She looked at Weigand. “You were there,” she said. “You’re a detective. Why don’t you remember?”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “I wasn’t a detective at the time, apparently. And most of the people were still strange to me, and distracting.”

  Dorian pointed out that most of them were strange to her, too.

  “And I’m not a detective,” she said. “Thank God.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. He felt a little nonplused for a moment.

  “It isn’t necessary that you like this, Miss Hunt,” he said, finally. “It isn’t necessary that you like us. But we’re hunting for a person who killed your friend. We’re trying to find out who, and why. It would seem to me that you would want to help.”

  The swinging brown leg swung more quickly; stopped swinging with the toe caught tensely against the floor.

  “Helen was my
friend,” the girl said, and her voice was without expression. “There’s nothing to do about that. I’ll tell you what I know, but I won’t—help hunt.” She stopped suddenly and looked at Weigand. “I’ve seen hunting,” she said. “I’ve seen men hunting a—” She broke off. “Other things,” she said, but it was not what she had intended to say.

  “Do you know any reason why somebody should want to kill your friend?” Heimrich asked.

  “No.”

  “Or Jean Corbin?”

  “I barely knew her,” Dorian said. “How would I know what people felt about her?”

  Weigand watched her and something came back, vaguely, uncertainly. He had seen her before and, gropingly, he went back into his memory. There was a chair and a light shining on it from behind and one crossed leg was swinging nervously. Then he had it, and he looked at Dorian Hunt gently, almost anxiously.

  “Are you Clayton Hunt’s daughter?” he asked. The leg swung quickly, then paused.

  “Why should you think I’m Clayton Hunt’s daughter?” she asked. “It’s a common name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “It’s a common name. Are you Clayton Hunt’s daughter?”

  She stared back at him.

  “All right,” she said. “Clayton Hunt is my father. So what now? Haven’t you done enough to us?”

  Her voice was higher. It did not shake, but it seemed as if it might break.

  “I’m not trying to do anything to you, Miss Hunt,” Weigand said. He felt Heimrich and the Norths looking at him, expectantly. “I just remembered. You testified for him and I happened to be in the courtroom. It wasn’t my case, you understand. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Well,” the girl said, “what has it got to do with this? Except to bring it all back—to make me conscious of it again?”

  Weigand said that he didn’t know it had anything to do with it, but Heimrich said, “What’s all this?”

  “I’ll tell him!” Dorian said. She said it bitterly. “My father was Clayton Hunt. Didn’t you read about it? Everybody else read about it. He was a broker and everybody thought he was fine—he was fine. But then he lost, and borrowed on securities friends had let him have and—and they hunted him, and closed in on him and said he was a thief. And they sent him to prison. Is that what you want to know?”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “That Hunt. Yes, I remember. I’m—I’m sorry about it.”

  “Why,” the girl said, “should you be sorry about it? Nobody asked you to be sorry about it.”

  There was something else about the case, Weigand was thinking. It had been, from her side, as she told it. Everybody had thought highly of Clayton Hunt. He had been on many boards, some of them charitable. And he had—if you wanted to call it that—“borrowed” on securities entrusted to him, in one or two cases by the boards and in one case by the board of one of the charities. Probably he had meant to repay. But he didn’t repay. And so he was in Sing Sing. But there had been something else.

  “When did you meet Helen Wilson?” he asked, suddenly. Dorian looked at him, and she looked as if she hated him.

  “About four years ago,” she said.

  “Was she with the advertising agency then, do you remember?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Wasn’t she the secretary—?”

  The girl broke in.

  “All right,” she said. “Hunt and dig and hurt people. All right. She was my father’s secretary. They made her testify against him. They said awful things about her and about him and they weren’t true. Nobody thought they were true, but he was down—and we were down. So it was great fun for the papers.”

  Weigand remembered, now, although there was no image with his memory—only a name. Helen Wilson. She had, reluctantly, testified for the State; she had tried to minimize what they made her tell, tried to make it sound better. They hadn’t let her. And one of the newspapers had tried to twist her evident regard and respect for Clayton Hunt into something else—hinting, half-saying, printing lines meant to be read between.

  “She came to us,” Dorian said. “To Mother and me, before Mother died—before it killed her. She didn’t want us to believe what they said—she wanted us to know that Father was as fine with her as he always was.”

  “You believed her?” Heimrich asked.

  She looked at him.

  “What would you know about a man like Father?” she said. Her voice was dull, rather hopeless. “Of course we believed her—we knew him. She was just another person who had suffered; who had been caught, as he was and we were, by the hunters—tracking him down, twisting what he did—”

  Suddenly the reddish brown hair was down against an arm of the green suit, and she was sobbing. Mrs. North knelt beside her and put an arm about her shoulders and glared at the detectives. She glared at him as much as at Heimrich, Weigand was disturbed to notice.

  “Damn you both,” Mrs. North said. “Leave her alone—you—you men!”

  Weigand felt a little embarrassed and, looking at Heimrich, he saw that Heimrich apparently felt the same. Mr. North too, he imagined. Mrs. North looked at them angrily, and drew Dorian to her feet.

  “You’re going to leave her alone,” she said. “You’ve asked her all you’re going to ask. I’m—I’m taking her riding.”

  Dorian Hunt straightened a little when the two went out. But she did not look back, and she let Mrs. North guide her.

  “Riding?” Heimrich said.

  Mr. North nodded.

  “It’s Pam’s remedy,” he said. “When people are troubled, take them somewhere in a car. I wouldn’t try to stop them.”

  “No,” Weigand said. “I think he’s right about that.”

  There was the grind of a starter and the roar of a motor as it caught and raced. The gears meshed with an angry snarl.

  “She always does that,” Mr. North said. “Particularly when she’s in a hurry. I can’t think why.”

  The motor snorted and died. It started more angrily than ever. The gears snarled again. The motor coughed and settled into its stride.

  “They’re gone,” Mr. North said. “Unless she hit something getting out. Will one of you look?”

  They were gone, Weigand discovered. There was what looked, from the distance, like a streak of green paint on one of the gate-stones and it looked as if a green car—about the color of the Norths’—had left it. But Weigand decided not to mention that.

  “So,” Heimrich said as Weigand turned back into the room, and felt that it was peculiarly emptier than it had been.

  “So?” Weigand said.

  “Would it be a motive if Miss Hunt thought the Wilson girl had helped send her father up?” he inquired. “Particularly if she didn’t believe that everything was innocent between her father and the Wilson girl? Could Miss Hunt merely have pretended to believe that everything was innocent and waited her time?”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “it could be argued that way, I suppose. She obviously feels deeply about her father—maybe she isn’t very balanced when that subject comes up. Only—”

  “Only?” Heimrich mimicked.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “I won’t say it.”

  Heimrich said he wouldn’t. She seemed like a nice girl, sure. She didn’t look like a murderer, she looked—

  “Sunny,” Weigand said, to his own surprise.

  All right, Heimrich would agree, she didn’t look the part. And had all the murderers of Weigand’s acquaintance looked the part? Weigand told him to skip it.

  “I tell you what it is,” Heimrich said. “We don’t know anything about these people. Where they come from, what they are—this goes back into the past. Tangles we don’t know about. Relationships—”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Nobody’s stopping us. We’ll find out. Who do you want to work on next?”

  Heimrich thumbed his list and said they might as well finish the people at the Wilson house. Kennedy, say.

  Kennedy looked like a recent Princeton graduate
. He was a recent Princeton graduate, now working in Wall Street. He had spent the day before in utter innocence, driving with Helen to meet Thelma Smith; lunching, watching the tennis, going home afterward to mix a cocktail for Mrs. Wilson and sit soberly on the porch with her, discussing his mother’s friends. Mrs. Wilson had grown up with some of his mother’s friends. Then he had gone to the party, and the time he had had couldn’t have been better until the end, which couldn’t have been more horrifying.

  He knew the Wilsons through his family; more precisely, knew Mrs. Wilson through his family. He had seen very little of any of them, however, until a few months earlier. He had been at school and everything. He had met Helen for the first time the winter before. The families had drifted apart when Mrs. Wilson married the second time and when Helen came into the family and—

  “Came into the family?” Heimrich asked, puzzled.

  “Perhaps I phrase that badly,” he said. “But she’s Mrs. Wilson’s stepdaughter, you know, not her own daughter.”

  The two detectives looked at each other.

  “Well,” Heimrich said. “That’s the first—” He broke off at a shake of Weigand’s head.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kennedy,” Weigand said. “I take it you know of no reason for Helen Wilson’s murder? Or Jean Corbin’s?”

  Kennedy shook his head.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “I think that will be all, for now.”

  Kennedy went out, looking relieved. Heimrich started to speak.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “But let’s get it from Mrs. Wilson, shall we? We’re getting too much second-hand, as it is.”

  Heimrich thought a moment, and nodded.

  “Send for her?” he asked. “Or—?”

  Weigand thought that, under the circumstances, they might go down to the Wilson house. Heimrich nodded again. When they started they did not invite Mr. North to go with them, but he decided they had not invited him to stay behind. So he followed along. It was getting interesting, he decided.