A Pinch of Poison Read online

  “The movie one,” Mrs. North explained. “The one you’re always reading about. They don’t keep any records!”

  Mrs. North spoke as if this were a rather dreadful thing, which came, Weigand thought, oddly from Mrs. North. He thought of investigating, out of sheer personal curiosity, and pushed the thought away. He wondered whether Miss Crane could tell him how Miss Winston had spent the previous day; her last day.

  “As far as her work here went, I mean,” he explained.

  Miss Crane nodded. She already had got out the assignment record, she said. Miss Winston had been on an investigation during the afternoon, talking with prospective foster parents. Earlier she had been making a routine checkup at the Municipal Building.

  “Yes?” Weigand said. “How was that?”

  It was, it seemed, simple enough. One of the Foundation’s older wards—a girl of seventeen, who had not been adopted and was being partly supported by the agency—had made up her mind to get married to a boy of about her own age.

  “We hoped she hadn’t,” Miss Crane said. “There were several reasons, none of which matter. We tried to reason her out of it.”

  They were not sure they had been successful and had suspected that the girl had got married anyway, falsifying her age. Miss Winston, with her own appointment several hours off, had volunteered to check at the Municipal Building on marriage licenses issued during the past week or two. That was what she had done Tuesday morning. Weigand, listening, said “Hm-m-m” with interest and the women looked at him.

  “That hooks up with something,” Mrs. North challenged. “When you sound that way, it always hooks up with something. Doesn’t it?”

  Weigand admitted that it might, but volunteered nothing. Mrs. North commanded with her eyes and he shook his head. “Later, maybe,” he told her. He turned back to Mary Crane.

  “In the afternoon,” she said, “Lois seems to have gone to see some prospective foster parents—a Mr. and Mrs. Graham who live”—she consulted a card—“up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.”

  “Where,” Mrs. North wanted to know, “is that?”

  It was, Weigand told her, the section the Henry Hudson Parkway ran through after it crossed the Harlem River. She looked puzzled.

  “Ben Riley’s,” he explained.

  She brightened, and then clouded suddenly.

  “Isn’t that still Manhattan?” she said. “I always thought so.”

  Weigand told her it was the Bronx, all right. But not the Bronx one usually thought of. He broke off, thinking.

  “This investigation,” he said. “This may sound foolish to you but—could there be anything dangerous in it? I mean, could she—or any worker—find out something that she shouldn’t and—well, antagonize people?” He saw that Miss Crane was smiling, and smiled back, rather apologetically. “I suppose,” he said, “I’m thinking of our kind of investigations—police investigations.”

  Miss Crane said he probably was. Investigations of possible foster homes would not, she said, be at all likely to lead the investigators into dangerous situations.

  “It is a little difficult to explain to a layman,” she said. “Particularly against all the background of misinformation which has been built up in the layman. Our ‘investigations’ don’t include any prying. They are conversations, chiefly—the worker talks to the prospective foster parents and tries to get to know them; she looks over their house and gets an idea about their financial standing. She asks them questions which, when they first apply for children, they are told will have to be asked. She sees neighbors and friends and relatives whose names the foster parents supply for that purpose. You can see there are a good many things we have to know, before we trust a child with strangers.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “It is all done for the child, essentially,” she told him. “But in some measure for the foster parents, too. The more we know about them, the better chance we have of—well, fitting them with a child. If the foster parents have been through college, for example, they will be happiest with a child who may, some day, go through college, and they would be disappointed with a child whose mind wasn’t fitted for formal education. And we try to fit races and temperaments and—well, you can see it is something of a job.”

  “And Miss Winston was a good worker?” Weigand said.

  “Very,” Miss Crane told him. “She—well, it has been a very great shock to all of us, Lieutenant.”

  Weigand nodded. Pam North broke in.

  “Are the Grahams the people who are going to get Michael?” she said. Miss Crane nodded.

  “Michael?” Weigand echoed.

  “The little boy we are thinking of placing with Mr. and Mrs. Graham,” Miss Crane told him. “A child of about three. The placement seems to be very suitable, although Miss Winston’s death will delay matters. She was handling it, and much of the investigation may have to be done over. I won’t know until I have read her recent reports.”

  “Oh,” said Weigand. He thought it over. Michael, he decided, didn’t come in. He might see the Grahams, because it sometimes helped to find out what a person who had been murdered was doing and saying in the hours before death. It would be, just possibly, worth a trip to Riverdale. Meanwhile—He stood up and started to thank Miss Crane. He was glad, at any rate, to know that Lois Winston had had an opportunity to go over the marriage license lists at the Municipal Building. It would be interesting to find out whether, in searching them, she had run across a name more familiar to her than that of the wayward ward of the Placement Foundation.

  “Listen,” Mrs. North said, firmly. “I think you ought to hear about Michael. It’s a very strange story and—well, you never know.”

  Weigand started to shake his head, and again met command in Pam North’s eyes. She was, for some reason, rather eager about this, he decided. He looked at his watch. Another half-hour wouldn’t make much difference, one way or the other.

  “What,” he said, “about Michael?”

  Mrs. North looked at Mary Crane and nodded. Miss Crane seemed puzzled. She said she couldn’t see what bearing it could possibly have. She looked at Lieutenant Weigand and smiled questioningly and he nodded, just perceptibly.

  “If it doesn’t take too long,” he said. “We want to keep Mrs. North happy.”

  It wouldn’t, Miss Crane agreed, take long. It was, like all the Foundation’s case histories, confidential. “Mrs. North is on the committee, of course,” Miss Crane explained. She looked a little bewildered about that, Weigand noticed. He merely nodded, barricading a sympathetic grin. The nod accepted the forthcoming information as confidential.

  Michael, Miss Crane explained, was a little boy of three with a rather unusual history. He had come to the organization some six weeks earlier, being brought under care by a man who said he was the child’s father. Miss Crane herself had eventually interviewed the man—an odd, unshaven man who looked ill and, eventually, said he was ill. He wore dark glasses, she said, and even so sat with his back to the window because the light hurt his eyes. He wanted to surrender Michael, his son, for adoption. He had not brought the boy.

  “He said he was Richard Osborne,” Miss Crane said. Osborne said he had been a draftsman, but recently had been too ill to work. He had been taking care of Michael by himself since his wife had left him, when they were living in San Francisco. He had come to New York on an offer of a job and had got it, but held it only a few months. That had been during the winter before. While he still had the job, he had begun to feel weak and ill and had looked around for someone with whom he could board the child. Through a man who worked with him he had heard of a woman—a Mrs. Halstead—who sometimes boarded children. She—Miss Crane stopped. She had been summarizing from a sheaf of papers on her desk, now and then checking her memory against something written there. Now she looked up.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember, now. I should have started back a bit. Mrs. Halstead lives up in Riverdale too, you see. But it isn’t merely coincidence.”


  “Well,” Weigand said, “let’s finish with the boy.”

  The boy’s father, Miss Crane continued, had gone to see Mrs. Halstead, decided she would be suitable, and arranged to board the child there. He had done so until recently, paying seven dollars each week. For the past several weeks, however, he had been unable to pay.

  That was because he had, recently, grown so ill that he could not continue to work. He had gone to a doctor and, on the doctor’s advice, to the Veterans Bureau. A complete physical examination had followed.

  “I’m a very sick man, Miss,” he had told Miss Crane. From his description, he was indeed a very sick man. He had contracted tuberculosis and, in addition, had a serious heart condition. Those things were, he said grimly, in addition to an eye ailment he had had, off and on, for years. The upshot was that he had been accepted for care at a Veterans Hospital. Because of his lungs, they were sending him to Arizona. But they were not hopeful.

  “I am going to die very soon,” he said. He said it matter-of-factly, Miss Crane remembered. Before he died, he wanted to make provision for Michael. He could no longer pay board to Mrs. Halstead, but he believed she would keep the child in any case. She had, he said, grown attached to Michael. But she was an old woman and, he had recently decided, a difficult one. “Cantankerous,” he said. “I’ve heard—”

  He had, he explained, heard indirectly that Mrs. Halstead was severe with Michael and irritable. He was sure that this was only on the surface; that at bottom the woman was deeply attached to the little boy. But she was too old to take permanent charge of him as Osborne suspected she now wanted to do. What he hoped was that the Foundation could take the boy under care and arrange, eventually, for his adoption by a couple nearer the right age.

  “I don’t want him brought up by an old woman,” Richard Osborne had insisted. “And I can’t care for him. I’m not going to live long enough.”

  He had, he said, somebody in mind. When he had heard that Mrs. Halstead was irritable with the child, he had gone to a park in which he knew Michael and the boarding mother went for walks. He had watched, and seen Mrs. Halstead pull at the child’s arm, and snap at him irritably. And he had seen Michael run to another, much younger woman, who called him by name. Michael had run to this woman and it had seemed to the man, watching, that there was a flow of affection between them which was what he wanted for his son.

  It was that woman, or someone like her, he wanted for his child, he explained. Possibly that very woman, who had somehow got to know Michael in the park, and perhaps to care for him. He didn’t know, of course, whether she would want to adopt the boy—so far as he knew she might have children of her own. But seeing her with his boy had made him realize more acutely than ever what the child should have. And it was that he wanted the Foundation to find for Michael. He wanted, he said, to surrender the child to the agency and have him cared for.

  “I told him we could not accept a child without seeing him,” Miss Crane explained. “We have to know whether children are suitable for adoption; sometimes, for various reasons, it is hopeless to try to find permanent, private homes for them. We told him that we would see the child and investigate conditions and let him know.”

  But he had insisted that that would not do. He was leaving for the hospital, he said, the next day; his transportation had already been arranged. He wanted things settled for the child before he went; doggedly, he kept insisting that he would die soon and that delay was impossible.

  “It seemed to me a special case,” Miss Crane said. “Finally I agreed on a compromise. Since he insisted, he could sign a release at once and authorize Mrs. Halstead to turn the child over to us. We would not be bound by it unless we found the child suitable for placement. If we did not, we would communicate with him and, if he could do nothing—I meant, really, if he was dead—we would have to turn the case over to the Department of Welfare. Finally he agreed to that and we let him sign the surrender, making us the guardians of the child.”

  It was interesting, Weigand found. It had nothing to do with him, but it was interesting—interesting and worrying to think of this gaunt, dying man sitting in that room, trying to provide in some way for a little boy.

  “Now,” Miss Crane went on, “we go back—and this is coincidence. Checking up, we found that that was not the first time we had heard of little Michael Osborne.”

  A couple of weeks before Osborne came with his story about the child, Miss Crane said, a woman in her early thirties had come to the agency and had asked to see Miss Crane. She had come about a little boy she had met with an old woman—a strange old woman, she said—in a park in Riverdale. She had met the two often and, because he was a charming little boy and she was childless, she had talked to him and petted him. “I’ve always wanted children,” she said to Mary Crane, simply.

  She had discovered, through talking to the woman, that the child was not related to the elderly woman; that she had been caring for him on a boarding basis, but had grown very fond of him and was beginning to think she might adopt him. It made the younger woman suddenly think that perhaps she might have the little boy for her own.

  “The woman is too old to take care of him,” the visitor had told Miss Crane. “She is cross with him—rough. I don’t think he ought to be living there, in that dark old house.”

  The woman, who said she was Mrs. Graham, had gone home with the old woman and the little boy, once, and seen the house. “All run down,” she said. “A strange, dark barn which must have been there on the hill for ages. Awful for a little boy.”

  Mrs. Graham wanted the agency to do something; to investigate and to take the child from the old woman and the strange, dark house. And then, if they thought it advisable, let her have the child. But that last was only if they thought best; in any case, the child must be got out of that house.

  Miss Crane had told her, gently, that there was nothing they could do, directly. They might—or she might—take the matter up with the authorities, although it was not likely that the authorities would intervene. The Placement Foundation was a private charity and, although it worked closely with the Department of Public Welfare, had no official standing. So it could do nothing. Mrs. Graham had showed disappointment but had seemed to understand and had said she would think it over. Perhaps, if it finally seemed to her best, she might go to the authorities herself. Then, as she was going, she had stopped, suddenly, and asked whether the Foundation could get her a child.

  “We told her, of course, that we were always glad to get applications from possible foster parents,” Miss Crane said. “I had Miss Winston come in and she talked it over with Mrs. Graham and eventually took her application. It was on file when Michael’s father came to us and wanted to surrender the child. Then—”

  Miss Crane stopped suddenly, and looked at Mrs. North in a surprised way.

  “You know, Mrs. North,” she said, “perhaps you were right, all along. Perhaps there is a connection.”

  Miss Winston, Miss Crane said, had gone to see the child at Mrs. Halstead’s and found conditions much as the child’s father and Mrs. Graham had described them. The child’s situation was not good, the environment, including Mrs. Halstead herself as part of it, definitely unsuitable. She had also reported that Michael was a nice, alert little boy, almost certainly suitable for adoption. As a result, the Foundation had decided to take the child from Mrs. Halstead’s, acting on the strength of the father’s surrender and his note to Mrs. Halstead. Miss Winston had gone alone first to get the child, and had run into a tirade of abuse from Mrs. Halstead, who refused to give him up. There had been nothing to do, then, but to bring the police in and in the end the child had to be removed almost forcibly.

  “Mrs. Halstead was a strange old woman, apparently,” Miss Crane said. “She was almost frantic. She railed at Miss Winston and threatened her and only calmed down when the police officer proposed to take her into magistrate’s court with a view to having her committed to Bellevue for observation.”
/>   Weigand said “Hm-m-m” and then:

  “What kind of threats, do you know?”

  It might, Miss Crane said, be on Miss Winston’s report. She turned back through the sheaf of papers, found a place and read:

  “June 3. Agent went to Mrs. Halstead’s to remove Michael, accompanied by a patrolman, since Mrs. Halstead had been abusive on a previous visit. She was again abusive, threatening agent violently and screaming, ‘You’re going to pay for this!’ and other abuse. The child was removed and taken to boarding home in Queens.”

  Weigand said “Hm-m-m” again.

  “Right,” he said. “And the child is still in Queens?”

  “Yes,” Miss Crane said.

  “No,” Mrs. North said, at about the same time. She shook her head at Miss Crane and added: “He’s right here. Seeing the doctor or something. I saw him when I came in. Wait.”

  Nobody tried to stop her, which was as well. She went out and down a corridor, leaving Weigand and Miss Crane to look at each other, slightly baffled. Mrs. North returned with a small, blond boy who was riding in her arms and trying to catch a watch, shaped like a little silver ball, which dangled from her neck. He grabbed it and examined it carefully. He turned it over and beamed at it and made appreciative sounds. At the back, a rounded crystal left the busy works visible.

  “Wheels!” said Michael Osborne, quite clearly and in evident ecstasy. He pulled at the watch as Mrs. North put him down.

  “No, Michael,” she said. “Break. You mustn’t break my watch.” She cast an eye around. “Here,” she said, dangling the red purse. “Pretty.”

  Michael looked and was not interested.

  “He doesn’t seem to like purses,” Mrs. North said. She looked at the purse. “Of course,” she said, “he’s perfectly right, really. There’s nothing in it.”

  Michael was diverted, with some effort, by the offer of Weigand’s sturdier wrist-watch. He shook it briskly, said, “Ticks” with enjoyment, and then suddenly put it down on the floor.

  “Go, now,” Michael said, and walked firmly to the door. There was no diverting him this time. Convoyed by Mrs. North, Michael went.