Murder within Murder Page 8

  But she was dead, and Florence had been put on a spot because she had been lied to, and nobody was going to get away with that. If she had to, she would go to the police and tell them about it, and explain that she had been taken in by a story that anybody would have believed, because if she was going to be on a spot, somebody else was going to be there too. They’d see.

  Florence Adams had felt safe with the door locked, and having made up her mind what she was going to do. She had gone to sleep after a much shorter time than anybody would have expected, and she had slept until after ten o’clock. Then she had gone out to breakfast and come back in an hour and read the newspapers. It was after eleven when she went down and made her telephone call.

  At first, she had a little trouble making the person who had put her on the spot realize who she was.

  “Florence Adams,” she said, and said it several times. “The maid at the Holborn Annex. Where Miss Gipson lived.”

  It had been clear, then, and Florence had gone at once to the point.

  “You put me on the spot,” she said. “You can’t get away with it. I’m going to the police.”

  She listened for a time.

  “I’d like to see you prove it,” she said then, skeptically. “You could get into her place. And somebody planted this poison—sodium something—there. It was worth a hundred bucks to you to get into the place. That’s a lot of money.”

  She listened again.

  “Listen,” she said, “there isn’t that much money. You think I want to be locked up? Or worse? I—”

  The voice at the other end of the wire broke in, and this time Florence listened for a longer period, although once or twice she started to break in. When the voice finally finished, Florence hesitated a moment.

  “You make it sound all right,” she said, and there was uncertainty in her voice. “You made it sound all right the other time. What do you want me to do?”

  “Let me talk to you,” the voice said. “You’re making a mistake. You’ll get yourself into trouble—needlessly.” The voice was slow, demanding attention and belief. “When you hear the full story you’ll realize that there is no connection between the two things. I did not kill Miss Gipson. I’m sure I can make you understand that. Only you must let me talk to you before you go to the police.”

  “Well—” Florence said.

  “It will be worth your while,” the voice said. “In more ways than one. You will see that you have nothing to reproach yourself with. And I won’t forget what you do. It is quite true that it is worth a good deal to me not to be involved in any way.”

  Florence Adams had thought for a moment, and what the voice said seemed reasonable. After all, the other was—was something that happened only in stories, like love different from that she had known with Fred; like inheriting a million dollars from an unknown uncle in Australia. It was to be expected that there would be an ordinary explanation.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll come and see you.”

  She listened again.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s not much of a place. It’s called Freeman’s Hotel and it’s in Forty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth. But it doesn’t matter to me. I’ll go back and wait for you.”

  She had listened to the voice again.

  “All right,” she said. “But you don’t need to go to the bank. If it’s like you say, I won’t tell the police. You don’t have to give me any more money.”

  Again she listened.

  “If you feel that way,” she said. “I could use it. I’ll probably have to get a new job because I missed today anyway. Only you don’t have to.”

  She had listened once more, this time briefly, and hung up the receiver. She had felt much better; that strange feeling of having done something wrong had left her. She had frightened herself for no reason. Suddenly she was lighthearted. Everything was fine. She had a hundred dollars and was going to have more and she would get a new job—perhaps a better job. And maybe she would meet Fred again, or someone better than Fred—someone with whom she would have more fun, someone who would be nicer to her, act more as if she were somebody to be thought of. And today she had nothing to do.

  She had looked at the clock in the drugstore from which she had telephoned and it had been only about 11:30. She had walked over to Broadway and up to Forty-seventh and then down on the other side, merely looking at things. It was a bright, warm day and people were out on the streets and the movies were open. She thought of going to a movie, but decided she would not have time. She felt very well and happy, as if the night had merely been a dream she had forgotten.

  She had gone to a chop suey restaurant at about 12:30, and the chop suey had been very good. It was a little after 1:00 when she went back to her room at the hotel, because she did not want to be late.

  The room was not on the side of the hotel which got the sun, if any side did. After the bright world outdoors, the room seemed dark and somehow grimy. The window, Florence Adams saw, opened on an air shaft, so the room could not have been sunny whatever side of the building it was on. But she would not have to stay there much longer. As soon as the talk was over she would go out where it was bright again, and then she would look for another room. A better room than she had had uptown, or than this; a room with sun in it.

  The person with whom she had made her appointment was prompt. Florence had been back in the room only a few minutes when there was a knock on the door. She got up from the bed on which she had been sitting and went across and opened the door, smiling.

  “Come in,” she said. “I told you it wasn’t—”

  And then, seeing what was in the visitor’s hand and seeing also what was in the visitor’s eyes, she began to walk backward into the room and she tried to speak. She tried to scream, but something was catching at her throat.

  She did not make any sound until the door had closed behind the visitor, and then she would not have known her own voice.

  “No!” she said, her voice was shrill and seemed to crack, but the volume of sound was very small. “No! You can’t! You can’t! You—”

  But Florence Adams was wrong about that. The noise was loud in the little room, but she did not hear it. The hotel was almost empty, because most of the people who lived in it were at work. And the room was, by a chance lucky for no one except the murderer, a long way from the little lobby. The clerk was old and tired, and did not hear very well, and to him the sound was dismissed as the backfire from a truck. It was dismissed so completely that he could not afterward remember it at all.

  But it would not have made any real difference to Florence Adams if he had heard it clearly for what it was; if he had been young and dangerous and had come running. It would not have made any difference to her who had come, or how quickly.

  7

  WEDNESDAY, 1:45 P.M. TO 3:35 P.M.

  They had split up after lunch at Charles. Jerry had gone back to his office, looking doubtfully at Pam as he left; looking as though he expected little good to come of this. Mullins had gone to the law offices of Williams, Franke and Backley, to find out what he could from Mr. Backley, presuming he could find Mr. Backley. Pamela North and Weigand had gone to Weigand’s office, on their way to visit with Mrs. Willard Burt, who had been in cryptic correspondence with Amelia Gipson. Bill Weigand wanted to see what had come in on Mrs. Burt before they discovered what could be got out of Mrs. Burt.

  There was more to do than that; more grist to consider. There was an answer to his telegraphed request for further information on Philip Spencer; there was the report of a precinct man that Mr. Spencer was apparently remaining obediently at home. There were reports on some of the men and women, boys and girls, who had happened to be reading in the New York Public Library when Miss Gipson drank poison there—if she did drink poison there.

  Pam, waiting, asked for and got Miss Gipson’s notebook on the Purdy case. It did not tell much more than she already knew; it did not tell as much as she already knew. The police had kept a secre
t or two for future use. She read that Mrs. Purdy had been taken suddenly ill after drinking a glass of water which should have had bicarbonate of soda in solution, Mrs. Purdy being momentarily troubled by gas. The water had, in fact, sodium fluoride in solution, which Mrs. Purdy might have noticed in time if she had not drunk the water off very rapidly because she disliked the flavor of bicarbonate of soda. She had lived longer than Miss Gipson had, Pam noticed; it had been almost eight hours before Mrs. Purdy had died. Pam supposed the dose had been smaller.

  It was not clear from Miss Gipson’s notes what had aroused the suspicions of the police, so Pam supposed that it had not been clear in the newspaper stories. But from the start, the police had been questioning Mr. Purdy about the death of his wife. They had never seemed impressed by the theory of accident, although admittedly the box which contained the poison had been generally similar to that which contained the soda and admittedly they had been kept close together—too close together, one would have thought—on a kitchen shelf. It was, to be sure, difficult to see how Mrs. Purdy would have made even more difficult mistakes, with similarly fatal results, without invoking serious police enquiry.

  Miss Gipson had noted the oddity, here, and commented on it for her author. “Apparently police had additional info not disclosed,” she had written, no doubt for future amplification. It was, incidentally, one of the last things she had written about the case. There was the additional fact that Purdy had disappeared; that he had been traced to the airport and aboard a plane, and that the plane had crashed and burned a few hundred miles short of Los Angeles. His body, badly burned, had been identified by unburned possessions—a ring, a wristwatch, keys. There the case had ended. It did not, Pamela thought, offer much to a writer, but you could never tell about writers. Jerry said as much, sometimes aggrievedly. If there had not been money involved—if Mrs. Purdy had not been a very rich woman, and Mr. Purdy an only moderately well-to-do man, and if he had not stood to inherit largely—the newspapers would hardly, Mrs. North thought, have given the matter much attention.

  Miss Gipson had revealed the final disposal of Mr. Purdy, had started a new sentence in her firm script and then had broken off to write: “I have been poisoned by—” in script which remained firm until the down stroke of the “y.” That stroke had continued, wavering, down the notebook page; it had ended, one could guess, when Miss Gipson’s hand would no longer obey her mind. Nothing in the Purdy case was half so interesting, so dramatic, as this unfinished record of it.

  Pam put the notebook down and looked at Bill Weigand, who was looking at her and waiting.

  “It was a strange coincidence,” she said.

  Bill nodded. He said there seemed to be a good many coincidences. Spencer’s presence, if it was a coincidence. Mrs. Burt’s first name, since Pam would have it that way. Pam nodded.

  “Only,” she said, “when you come down to it, there always are. Like meeting people on the street and having them telephone you when you’re thinking about them. Like speak of the devil and that sort of thing.”

  Bill said he still distrusted them. He said that he was ready to go see Mrs. Burt now.

  “Chiefly,” he said, “because Miss Gipson’s niece and her brother have gone to LaGuardia to meet the girl’s husband. There’s—well, there’s no use breaking that up since we don’t have to.”

  “And,” Pam said, “you want to wait until Mullins talks to the lawyer, Mr. Backley. Although I don’t say you wouldn’t just as soon be considerate, if everything else was even. Did they identify?”

  John Gipson had identified his aunt’s body, Bill told her. He had said that they both, he and his sister, wanted to help; he had explained that Major Kennet Frost was due in that afternoon and that his sister was keyed up, her feelings hopelessly confused, and in no condition to be coherent.

  “After all,” he had said, “her aunt murdered; her husband coming back after more than two years in the Pacific. It’s a lot for twenty-four hours.”

  Gipson was willing, he made it clear, to talk to the police at any time. He also, it was equally clear, wanted to go with his sister to the airport.

  “And,” Bill said, “actually we were in no hurry.”

  “Backley,” Pamela repeated. “Shall we go? And what about Mrs. Burt?”

  Bill told her what they had found out about Mrs. Burt on their way to the Burt apartment. She was a woman in her late forties; she had been a widow until about two years before, when she had married Willard Burt. Apparently she had had money before she married; apparently Burt also was well-to-do. They had come east from California some months after their marriage. They had lived in an apartment on Park Avenue for a few weeks less than a year. He stopped with that. Pam said they didn’t know a great deal.

  “We’ll know more,” Bill told her. “No answer yet from California.” He smiled at her. “Frankly, Pam,” he said, “it doesn’t take precedence.”

  “I know it’s a hunch,” she said. “And don’t call it intuition, Bill. She could be the right age, however.”

  The world, Bill pointed out, was full of people the right age.

  “Only one of whom wrote a letter,” Pam told him. “Don’t quibble, Bill.”

  It was clear he was not quibbling, Bill said, because there they were. The letter needed explanation; they had come to get the explanation.

  “Can I ask my questions?” Pam wanted to know.

  Bill shook his head as he held out a hand to assist her from the police car. Pam made polite acknowledgment of the hand by waving in its direction, which was all that either of them expected. She made polite acknowledgment of the shaking head by saying, “All right, Bill, then you do,” and they went into the apartment house.

  It was very elegant, in a curiously antique fashion. It had been built in expansive days. They entered a colonnaded expanse, too large to be called a lobby. There were concrete arches in various directions; there were concrete seats, faintly Grecian, with red cushions on them. A very ancient doorman got up from one of the seats and advanced as if he were moving to funeral music. They asked for directions to the Willard Burt apartment.

  He did not answer, but he did point. He pointed as if he were tired of pointing. They sighted with his finger and saw, in the subdued distance, among the colonnades, another old man in a green uniform—but without golden epaulets—sitting, evidently asleep, on another red cushion on another concrete bench. They went, Pam’s high heels clicking between the scattered rugs. The man was not asleep, or not quite asleep. He was guarding a tiny elevator. He got up when they were very close and looked at them.

  “The Burts,” Bill Weigand said, his voice unconsciously muted.

  The man did not answer, but he waved them toward the elevator. They got in and he got in, and the three of them filled it.

  “Listen,” Pam said, “this is a dreadful bottleneck. For such a big place and everything.”

  The elevator man did not seem to hear her.

  “There are other elevators,” Bill told her, his voice still hushed.

  The elevator stopped at the fifth floor. The elevator man waited and they got out.

  “There are ten elevators,” the man said in measured tones, shut the grill door, and went down.

  “I feel,” Pam said, “as if we should have sent flowers, don’t you, Bill?”

  There was only one door to consider. Bill pushed a button, and chimes came faintly from within. After a pause a middle-aged maid came to the door and looked at them politely.

  “Mrs. Burt?” Bill said. He did not wait for the question he could see forming. “Lieutenant Weigand, of the police,” he said. “You might tell her it is fairly important.”

  “The police?” the maid said. She sounded very surprised.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t know if she’s in,” the maid said. “She was out.” She looked at them doubtfully. “If you’ll come in, I’ll see,” she said. She still seemed very doubtful and surprised.


  The foyer was larger than many rooms, but it was gay and bright with chintz, and there were flowers on a table. There was a seat for two, and they sat on it. The maid came back after only a minute or two.

  “Mrs. Burt has just come in,” she said. “If you will come this way?”

  They went that way. They went into an enormous living-room, with a fireplace—with white chairs and green chairs and yellow chairs; with many glowing lamps and with a middle-aged woman standing near the center.

  “Mr. Weigand,” the maid said. “He says he’s from the police. And—” She looked at Mrs. North, who was unexplained.

  “Mrs. North,” Bill said, not explaining. “Mrs. Burt?”

  “Do come in,” Mrs. Burt said. “Do come in and sit down, Mr. Weigand. And Mrs.—” She let the last trail off. She spoke in a light, quick voice, as if she were excited. She was a gray-haired woman, slight and rather pretty; a few years ago she must have been very pretty. There was softness and fragility about her, and a kind of eagerness. She motioned them to one of two facing sofas and, when they were in front of it, sat down opposite them. They sat down.

  “I am investigating the death of Miss Amelia Gipson,” Bill said. “You’ve probably read about it?”

  “Oh yes,” Mrs. Burt said, and there was a kind of eagerness in her voice, as if she were pleased to be able to make the right answer. “Dear Amelia. I’m so sorry. So terribly sorry. We were girls together, you know.”