Death Takes a Bow

by Frances Lockridge

  “I—” Mr. North began.

  “Hold it, buddy!” Patrolman Byrnes directed. He took hold of Mr. North’s shoulders and pushed Mr. North from him. Then he drew Mr. North back sharply. Mr. North’s head bobbed. “Don’t try any funny business,” Patrolman Byrnes advised. “Tell it to the loot.”

  He took Mr. North firmly by his shoulders, turned him around and, now using only one hand, propelled him up the corridor to the door leading into the speakers’ room. He propelled Mr. North through the room and through the door leading onto the stage.

  Mr. North, who had left the stage unnoticed, returned to it with publicity. Patrolman Byrnes gave Mr. North a final shove and released him. Mr. North staggered and caught himself.

  “Why, Jerry!” Pam North said. “What ever in the world?”

  Bill Weigand, standing with several other men beside what had been Mr. Sproul, looked up at Mr. North and started grinning.

  “Bill,” Mr. North said. “Tell this—”

  “All right, officer,” Bill Weigand said. He grinned at Jerry. Feebly, Jerry grinned back. Detective Sergeant Aloysius Mullins, standing a little behind Weigand, beamed—at least Jerry preferred to think it was a beam. Patrolman Byrnes looked puzzled.

  “All right, fella,” Sergeant Mullins informed the patrolman. “This guy’s Mr. North. He’s a pal, see?”

  Byrnes looked stubborn for a moment.

  “He was runnin’,” Byrnes said. “He looked funny to me.”

  Pam North and Weigand and Mullins, and Dorian Weigand who had joined them when her husband arrived, looked at Mr. North and smiled. Probably, Mr. North thought—and a hand went up to his now doubly damaged shoulder—I look funny to all of them. And then he realized that he had made his unimposing entrance in full view of the audience—the audience before which he had recently performed so satisfactorily. He looked at the audience, which had not grown perceptibly smaller. The audience looked back at him. Some of its members had no expressions which could be diagnosed. But there could be no doubt that several of its members were grinning.

  3

  Thursday, 9:10 P.M. to 10 P.M.

  Detective Sergeant Mullins nudged the group on the platform away from the big chair behind the lectern and the sprawled body in it, and the police photographers moved in. There were two of them and they ignored the audience, talking jargon between themselves, but talking it a little more audibly than was their custom. Even police photographers, Pam thought, watching them, played up before an audience. They shot the body from the sides and from above, they pictured it in relation to the lectern; one of them backed out and took a wide-lensed view of as much of the stage as could be got in, with the body at its center.

  Lieutenant William Weigand, watching with a kind of attentive abstraction, also listened to Mr. North. Mr. North told him about the little dark man who had run so fast and Bill Weigand agreed that it was odd and cried out to be looked into. However—

  “You’ll admit, Jerry,” he said, “that you can’t give us much to go on. By way of description—little and dark. Little I’ll give you; dark perhaps only because you saw him in the dark. It would take in thousands.”

  “Obviously,” Jerry agreed. “Millions. But if you saw a little dark man running out of the building you could stop him.”

  Bill Weigand agreed with that, and that they would. For the moment, at any rate, they were stopping anybody who tried to leave the building—running or walking, tall or short, without regard to color. But that, obviously, had a time limit.

  “There’re five or six hundred out there,” Weigand pointed out, waving toward the audience. “Some of them left before we came. We can’t hold the rest.” He looked at the audience. “Or want to hold the rest,” he said. “Our man wasn’t killed from the audience.”

  He looked at Jerry, consideringly.

  “As a matter of fact,” he added, “we don’t know he was killed at all. It’s even money, or thereabouts, that he merely up and died. Thrombosis. Apoplexy. Cerebral hemorrhage. Klingman says he can’t tell.”

  “He also,” Jerry North pointed out, “says it could have been a drug. A narcotic—opium or something.”

  That, Weigand agreed, was what kept them there. That was why they took pictures; why—now Weigand nodded—they took fingerprints of the body. Two men were rolling the dead fingers on pads; rolling the inked fingers on slips of paper, clipped in order. The men finished as Jerry and the lieutenant watched.

  “O.K.,” one of the men said. “What else, Loot?”

  Weigand hesitated. What else indeed? There was no weapon to be powdered and examined, no heavy object or light object which might have played a part. Jerry, considering too, jerked his head toward the door which led to the speakers’ room. Weigand nodded and gave directions. Everything, he told them.

  “Perhaps your little dark man will show up,” he said to Jerry. “Perhaps—”

  “There ought to be a glass in there,” Jerry North told him. “He was drinking out of one. Before we came out here.”

  Weigand was interested. Jerry told him what he remembered, or thought he remembered. It was, he agreed, only an impression. He told of looking for the glass after Sproul died and failing to find it. He thought of something.

  “Maybe the little dark man was looking for it, too,” he suggested. Bill Weigand nodded. Again, he agreed, it was interesting. It might be more than interesting when they knew where they were. The detective’s eyes roved over the scene as he talked to Jerry, noting, sorting, rejecting. Dr. Dupont was sitting in a chair, now, with Dr. Klingman beside him. Dr. Dupont was staring at the floor. Mrs. Williams was standing off to the side and Dorian Weigand was near her, but they did not seem to be talking. The photographers were packing equipment; the fingerprint men were crossing toward the speakers’ room door. Sergeant Mullins exercised general supervision, waiting.

  It was the lull, Weigand thought. It might be the lull before the storm; it might be a lull which would merge into a larger lull. The machine was set up, the materials which would be fed into it stacked in readiness. Only the switch needed to be thrown. Had Sproul been killed? Or had he merely, if publicly, died? It was an appropriate time for the entrance of science.

  Science, taking her cue, entered in the shape of Dr. Jerome Francis, assistant medical examiner. He came through the door from the speakers’ room and sneezed.

  “Damn that powder,” he said. He looked at Weigand, and then at Sproul.

  “What,” he said, “have we here?”

  Weigand asked him what he thought.

  “Corpse,” Dr. Francis told him, succinctly. “And you want to know when he died. Down to the half minute.”

  “We know when he died,” Weigand said. “He died when North here finished introducing him.” Bill Weigand looked at Jerry North. “No necessary connection,” Weigand added, reassuringly. He turned back to Dr. Francis. “He died just as he was about to make a speech,” he told the assistant medical examiner. “But we don’t know of what.”

  “Probably,” Dr. Francis told him, crossing to the body, “probably the intervention of Providence. It could happen oftener.”

  Dr. Francis looked down at the body. He looked at Klingman, still beside Dr. Dupont; to the eyes of another professional, in professional attendance.

  “You examined him, Doctor?” the assistant medical examiner asked. Klingman nodded, and moved a step nearer. The two physicians withdrew into the medical world, symbolically taking the body with them. They nodded over it. Klingman pointed at the eyes and Francis nodded. Francis flexed the dead fingers, and Klingman nodded. The lay world waited. The physicians nodded again, now evidently in agreement, and unexpectedly shook hands. Dr. Francis came over to Weigand and Mr. North, who waited anxiously.

  “Well,” Dr. Francis said, “he’s dead, all right.”

  “Good God!” Bill Weigand said. He looked at Dr. Francis without approval. “Do tell,” he said. “Dr. Klingman and I find ourselves in agreement,”

  Dr. Franc
is went on. He was very grave—it seemed to Jerry North that there was a faint touch of amused malice in his gravity. “We agree he might have died of a lot of things.”

  “You’re a big help,” Bill Weigand assured him. “Both of you.”

  “Mark it ‘suspicious death,’” Francis directed. “That’s my report.” Bill Weigand looked at the doctor carefully.

  “And—?” he prompted.

  “Look for somebody who gave him an overdose of morphine,” Dr. Francis said. “Without quoting me. Or find out that he took an overdose himself.”

  “Addict?” Weigand wanted to know.

  “No,” Dr. Francis told him. “I shouldn’t think so. On the contrary.” He looked at Weigand, seriously grave now. “You want me to guess, Bill?” he inquired.

  “Right,” Bill Weigand told him. The physician nodded.

  “For a guess, then,” he said. “He was one of those people who are abnormally susceptible to morphine. Maybe there was something wrong with his arteries. Maybe he was just naturally sensitive. Susceptibility varies a lot. Maybe somebody knew that and gave him a dose of morphine, figuring it to kill him. Maybe somebody didn’t know it, and gave him a dose of morphine figuring to put him to sleep. Maybe somebody didn’t want to hear him make a speech.” He looked thoughtfully at the detective. “I’ve heard guys—,” he offered.

  Bill Weigand and Jerry North smiled in appreciation of the hinted jest. When the smiles ran their brief course, Bill Weigand took it up again.

  “Probably morphine,” he said. “Right? Probably—how long ago? How long ago was it given?”

  Dr. Francis shrugged. That was where susceptibility set in. Suppose the normal person took morphine by mouth. In half an hour, more or less, he might feel mental exhilaration and physical ease; objectively, his pulse would quicken. He might appear elated; might grow talkative. This condition would pass, but how soon it would be hard to guess. Susceptibility again. Then he would go to sleep, and sleep would become a coma, and, if nobody did anything, he might die. If he had taken enough morphine. He might die in a couple of hours, he might live ten hours.

  “But—,” Jerry said.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “He walked out here less than an hour ago. He died within a quarter of an hour.” He looked at Dr. Francis.

  “It could be,” the doctor said. “We’re granting remarkable susceptibility. Like that of a child. Or of a person with arteriosclerosis. Or some other circulatory trouble. Or both together—a naturally highly susceptible person with circulatory trouble. In other words, a special case.”

  “But a possible case?” Weigand said. “Right?”

  “We think so,” Dr. Francis said. “I told you it was a guess. Maybe he died of a blood clot on the brain. Maybe somebody held a pillow over his head and suffocated him. Medically. But somebody would have noticed if Mr. North, here, held a pillow over your corpse’s head. Not very private up here, was it?”

  “Somebody would have noticed,” Bill Weigand agreed, gravely. “We can count out the pillow, or poison gas.” He stared over at the body of Victor Leeds Sproul. “Natural causes,” he said, thoughtfully. “Or morphine? Anything else?”

  Conceivably, Dr. Francis told him. Opium, of course. But that was morphine all over again. Possibly cocaine, although that, in view of Sproul’s behavior before he died, was not indicated. Call it suspicious, he repeated. Work tentatively on the assumption of an overdose of morphine, not self-administered—unless they had a suicide on their hands. Assume peculiar sensitivity on the part of Sproul, wonder whether he had displayed it in the past and recovered and left a confession of weakness as a small, curious fact in the mind of someone unidentified.

  “How much morphine?” Weigand asked. Francis shrugged. Susceptibility again. Addicts could stand a lot; people had died from less than a grain. Grown people; children from less still. If injected hypodermically, the drug might give three times the effect, in a third the time of the same quantity taken by mouth. Also it might not.

  He was helpful, Lieutenant Weigand told him bitterly. It would be impossible to get on without him. Francis ostentatiously snubbed the sarcasm, and said he was very glad. He said he would now help further by having the body taken away and opened up. Then he might know something. He’d run LeFort’s test and if it was morphine they’d know. Meanwhile—

  Far be it from Dr. Francis to tell the Lieutenant his business. But if he were detecting, he would be interested in anything Sproul had had to eat or drink within a couple of hours of his death, and in the persons who gave it to him. He would report “suspicious death” and go on the assumption of “homicide.”

  Bill Weigand nodded and stood for a further moment in thought. Then he said, “Right” and “Thanks.” He crossed to the lectern and rapped on it with the gavel. Everybody looked at him.

  “As you’ve gathered,” Lieutenant Weigand told the audience, “Mr. Sproul has died very suddenly. The police are in charge and I see nothing to be gained by keeping you here. So most of you may go. But I want to talk to any of you who knew Mr. Sproul personally—knew him here or in Paris, recently or even a number of years ago. I’ll ask any of you who did know him, even slightly, to remain. Is that clear?”

  The members of the audience looked as if it was clear enough.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “I might add that we have the means of making a fairly complete check on those who did know Mr. Sproul, so I’d advise anybody who might think he was saving himself trouble by not admitting acquaintanceship to abandon the idea. Is that understood?”

  It seemed to be. Weigand looked at the audience with grave severity, hoping that nobody would suspect how hard it would really be to sift out such of Sproul’s acquaintances as did not elect to be sifted. He held them a moment and turned away. The audience began to eddy out. Weigand wondered if Sproul’s murderer—always assuming a murderer—was in one of the eddies. He wondered—yes, already there were counter eddies pressing against the departing. The press was coming in, with cards in its hat-bands and folds of copy paper in its hands for notes and—It made Weigand think of something. Sproul probably had notes.

  He crossed to the body and ran long, nervous fingers into the inside coat pocket. Nothing. He felt a side pocket. Something. A sheaf of folded papers. Weigand flipped the fold open. He had Sproul’s notes for the first lecture of his de luxe tour. They began without preamble:

  “Tell you Paris meant to me. One American. That way what meant ENTIRE WORLD. Paris symbol of civilization in peril—little ways men lived there—big things happened there—things tourists saw—residents saw—right bank, left bank … try picture what world has lost—”

  The notes went on, but Bill Weigand broke off. They would come later, for what help they might be. But before words written down, dead now as the man who was to have spoken them, came people. Bill Weigand turned to the people.

  And Pamela North looked at the watch which dangled around her neck and said, unexpectedly and quite clearly, “Oh!” She crossed to Jerry, still looking. “Oh!”

  “Jerry,” she said. “The girls!”

  “What?” Jerry said. “What girls?”

  “The nieces,” Pam said. “What girls did you think?”

  “I didn’t think any girls,” he said. “I forgot all about them.”

  “One of us,” Pam said. “The Penn Station in—in five minutes, really. But they’ll be late, of course. They’re all late, nowadays.”

  It puzzled Bill Weigand, through his major puzzlement.

  “Nieces?” he said.

  “Trains,” Pam told him. “The war, somehow. They’re coming to visit us, because their mother is going to the hospital and their father can’t get away. The war, you know.”

  Bill Weigand sorted it out. Trains—no, nieces—were coming to see Pam North because, obscurely, of the war. They were going to be late in arriving, also because of the war. But Pam went on. She was addressing both men now—Jerry and Bill Weigand.

  “I hate to,” she said. �
��Leaving you with it. But I’ll come back and help as soon as I put them to bed. Martha is going to stay and look after them anyway.”

  “Listen,” Jerry said, “I thought—are you sure about their ages?”

  “Of course,” Pam North said. “Little girls. I’m sorry about the murder, but I’ll hurry.” She looked at Bill Weigand. “I wish you could wait for me,” she said. “But I suppose you can’t?” Bill smiled at her and shook his head.

  “Do you think—?” Pam began again, and stopped because both men were grinning at her, and because Dorian had come up and was smiling at all of them in an amused way.

  “We’ll do our best,” Bill Weigand told her gravely. “Naturally, it will be—”

  “You?” Pam said. “All of you.” She looked around the stage, and seemed a little wistful. “What a time for nieces!” she said. “I wish—”

  She did not say what she wished. She looked around again and accepted the situation with evident decision and went to the edge of the platform. She put a hand on the edge and dropped down without waiting for help and hit solidly and said “Ugh!” She did not pause, however, and went up an aisle, rubbing the dirt from her left hand with a handkerchief.

  Mrs. North’s steps were brisk but her spirit was reluctant. Here, she thought, is what looks like being one of the best murders we’ve ever had and I’ve got nieces. Little nieces. The thought filled her with rebellion.

  “It’s always women,” she thought and the taxicab driver, pushing the door open from inside, looked at her.

  “Huh?” he said. “Where’d you say, lady?”

  Pam realized that she had thought out loud again and sighed. Apparently there was, after all, nothing to be done about it. She couldn’t even be scared out of it, she decided. “Like hiccoughs,” she thought and, hearing the words, realized that she had done it again. She looked at the taxi driver a little anxiously and discovered that he was looking at her wildly.

  “Listen, lady,” he said. “I heard you. Do you want to go some place, that’s all I wanta know? Or do you just want to talk about hiccoughs?”