Death Takes a Bow

by Frances Lockridge

  It was, Weigand agreed. But it was merely an interesting side issue; one of those things which cropped up when you had to stir people around during an investigation. One of those oddities which had, in the end, nothing to do with the main issue, but which had to be noted down all the same, because you were finished before you knew what was important and what trivial. So—

  It was almost an hour later, and Weigand sat staring at his notes—the cryptic, fragmentary notes which he kept for his own reminders, supplementing Mullins record. Weigand stared at his notes and Mullins stared at Weigand. Finally Mullins said one word.

  “People!” Mullins remarked.

  Weigand nodded slowly. People indeed. People who had known Sproul and known one another; people who had sat and answered questions, telling what they wanted to tell but sometimes revealing more. The Akrons, brother and sister; George Schwartz, summoned from a copy desk, and flaring in sudden anger at a dead man; Ralph White, a large man who looked as if he lived on a small income and who had an odd, heavy expansiveness about him; Loretta Shaw again, to say, “So what?” to a question Weigand asked her; Y. Charles Burden, back unexpectedly and without summons, to give a warning which seemed at first glance to have no purpose, but which must have had. And finally Bandelman Jung of the unlikely name, who was, beyond question, a little dark man. But the little dark man?

  “People,” Weigand agreed.

  “The Akron dame,” Mullins remarked, a little querulously. “And her brother. If he is her brother.”

  Weigand nodded. She had been tall and almost sedate when she entered, had the Akron girl. Fair and tall, with a broad forehead and taffy-colored hair lying in braids, unfashionably but with effectiveness, around her head. She had been slow to answer and calm and she had known Victor Leeds Sproul in Paris. She had been living in Paris when he was there; she had returned, it became unexpectedly reasonable to suppose, when he returned. She had been doing nothing in Paris, except living there.

  It was she, jumping down to the present, who had planned the dinner for Sproul which was in a fashion a reunion and, in a fashion, a celebration of Sproul’s new career. A celebration in advance, of a career markedly aborted.

  “Poor Victor,” she said, sitting serenely. “Poor Victor. He was looking forward to it, I think.”

  Her voice was sober, as became a voice in the presence of sudden death. But it did not, it seemed to Weigand, reveal any sense of personal bereavement. Sproul, it appeared from words and tones, was a friend who had remained an acquaintance to Jean Akron; she was regretful at his taking off, but not greatly moved. She could remember nothing out of the way at the dinner; Sproul had seemed much as he always seemed. Certainly he had not seemed depressed. But he could always hide his feelings. It came over Weigand, listening, that each answer given by Jean Akron served to cancel the preceding answer; each sentence drew a line through the one which had come before. Was she careful? Or, as seemed equally probable, merely negative?

  It seemed, Weigand suggested, looking for a spark, unlikely that Sproul would have killed himself when he was about to try something both new and, apparently, interesting and when he was about to marry. Miss Akron had known he was about to marry.

  “Oh,” she said, “we all knew that. Or that he said he was.”

  “Do you mean,” Weigand pressed, “that you thought he really wasn’t?”

  The placid girl seemed faintly, but only faintly, surprised.

  “Why, no,” she said. “Why should I think that?”

  (Mullins had looked at her then, evidently puzzled. He had lifted his head, and his pencil from his notebook, and stared at her. She had not seemed conscious of the stare.)

  She knew Loretta Shaw, of course; she was very fond of Loretta. But she did not really know her well; they had met often in Paris, but had never been close friends.

  “We are so different,” Jean Akron explained. (Her tone might have thrown the onus for that difference on Loretta Shaw. But it might have implied no onus. Recalling, Weigand was not certain. But he was left, and of this he was certain, with the belief that Miss Akron had not really liked the slight, vivid girl who said she was soon to have married Sproul.)

  Jean Akron had not—as now Weigand led her into the past—known Sproul before he went to Paris. Weigand looked at her, guessed her age as the middle twenties, and said “of course not.” She had met him in Paris through her brother, who had known him somewhere in the United States—she was uncommonly vague just there—and had run into him when he was visiting her.

  “When my brother was visiting me,” she explained. “He didn’t live in Paris, of course. He was there on business.”

  She did not know of any reason for anyone to have killed Sproul, if he had been killed. She knew Mr. Burden slightly and thought him a “very pleasant man” and added, with an inflection, “but so dynamic.” She knew George Schwartz, then a name to Weigand, and Ralph White, another name. But she did not seem to know any of them well. Weigand let her go and had her brother in.

  (“If he is her brother,” Mullins said, when Weigand, reviewing for both of them, brought up his name. Weigand nodded.)

  It had seemed a question, certainly. Herbert Akron was at least fifteen years older than his sister. He had a sharp face and a high, domed forehead from which the hair receded, shrinking back from the edge of a precipice. He sat down, but sat restlessly. At almost every pause he scratched the thin hair over his right ear, but it was evident that he quieted no itch, except the itch to move his hand. And almost from the start he began to snarl.

  He did not see, to begin with, what business Weigand had bothering him. “Or Jean,” he added. “We hardly knew the heel.”

  “Heel?” Weigand repeated.

  Herbert Akron’s voice rasped as he described the kind of heel.

  “We never saw him,” he asserted. But then he admitted that they had seen him at dinner that evening. They “couldn’t get out of it.” It did not appear why they could not get out of it. “So we sat around listening to the pompous fool tell what a knock-out he was going to be in front of the women’s clubs. He—he gloated over it.”

  Akron’s tone was contemptuous.

  “And all the while he was planning to take poison,” Akron added, making the act of suicide an offense against the dignity of the Akrons. “Damned exhibitionist.”

  It was interesting to search out the root of this animosity. Weigand prodded around the base of Akron, looking for a lead. For a long time he was unsuccessful. But he discovered other things, some of which he wanted. He discovered that Akron headed a small, but growing, factory in New Jersey, which made a part—a very secret part, Akron indicated—for several bomber factories. He discovered that Akron and his sister shared an apartment on Park Avenue, not too far up. And he discovered that Akron’s tone changed when he spoke of his sister. It was hard, for a while, to put a finger on the nature of the change.

  Now and then, it developed, Akron and his sister entertained in their apartment people Jean had known in Paris. Akron spoke of such entertainments, and of the people, with contempt.

  “Something Jean wanted,” he said. “A pretentious bunch, all of them.”

  Sproul was there sometimes.

  “I thought you never saw him;” Weigand said.

  “As seldom as possible,” Akron assured him. “Only when we couldn’t get out of it.”

  But again it was not apparent what had kept them from getting out of it. It was not apparent, indeed, what had kept Akron from getting out of entertaining his sister’s Paris friends. It was not clear why Akron’s nerves were so on edge, why his voice rasped so. Unless edgy nerves and a rasping voice were part of Akron, as they might be.

  “Of course,” he said, “he hung around as much as he could. Everybody knew that.”

  “Hung around?” Weigand repeated. “Sproul hung around? You?”

  The tone was not incredulous; the tone could hardly be said to exist.

  “Jean,” Akron told him. “There was no sec
ret about that. But he never got anywhere. I kept an eye on him.”

  Weigand let his voice sound puzzled.

  “I understood,” he said, “that Sproul was engaged to be married. To a Miss Shaw—Loretta Shaw, isn’t it?”

  Akron sneered. There was, Weigand decided, no other word to fit it. Akron drew one corner of his mouth down in derision and let the other corner curl up. It was quite a face to make, Weigand thought.

  “Eye-wash,” Akron told him. “Sproul wasn’t marrying anybody. Not the Shaw girl. Not Jean. He was a heel.”

  Weigand waited a minute.

  “Did he want to marry Miss Akron?” he inquired.

  Akron said, “Hell, no.”

  “Not marry,” he added. His emphasis completed the remark. But he completed it in words. “A week end was about his speed,” he said.

  There was a kind of viciousness in his tone. “It sounded like his sister was his wife,” Mullins said, summing up. “You’d have figured he was jealous.”

  (Weigand looked at him and smiled faintly. He did not answer.)

  It had been then, unexpectedly, that Y. Charles Burden opened the door from the stage to the speakers’ room and came in without apology. Weigand looked at him without friendliness. Burden looked at Akron, ignoring the detectives.

  “You,” he said. “Shooting off your mouth again, probably. Getting Jean into a mess.”

  Akron looked at him and his mouth twisted.

  “Sir Galahad,” he said. He stared at Burden. “I’ll take care of my sister,” he told the lecture agent. “I don’t need any small-time Barnums.”

  “Listen,” Burden said. He ignored Akron and was speaking to Weigand. “This guy’s a nut, Lieutenant. Whatever he says about Jean, don’t believe him. She hadn’t anything to do with Sproul.”

  Weigand was interested. But his voice was mild.

  “That’s what he says,” he told Burden. “And who sent for you, Mr. Burden?”

  His voice was mild to the end. But the last question might have been put to a small, unruly boy.

  “All right,” Burden said. “But lay off her.”

  The last seemed more to Akron than to Weigand, but Weigand was included.

  “Get out,” Weigand said. “And stick around. Sergeant, see that Mr. Burden sticks around.”

  Mullins was up, and took Mr. Burden back to the door and out. Mullins’ voice rumbled for an instant in instruction to Detective Sergeant Stein. Mullins returned.

  “There’s another heel for you,” Akron said, with venom. “Another-small-time wolf.”

  Weigand’s voice was lighter, apparently friendly, seemed to be sharing a man-to-man situation.

  “After your sister too, is he?” Weigand said. “But what can you expect, Mr. Akron? With a sister like that?”

  Akron looked at him with no corresponding friendliness.

  “A helluva chance,” he said. “Burden or any heel like him. What do they think she is?”

  Weigand refrained from telling him. Weigand said he might go. And he, unlike Burden, might go where he liked. It was kind of him to help. Akron went, after a hard look at Weigand.

  “There’s a guy’d like to kill somebody,” Mullins said. “But why? Guys don’t kill for their sisters, Loot?”

  “They have,” Weigand assured him, “to protect them … or something.”

  Mullins looked puzzled.

  George Schwartz had come in ambling. He was very thin and well over six feet; his legs had an odd detachment of their own, and seemed to be leading the rest of Schwartz. Schwartz’s face was broad and flexible, with high cheekbones and an extraordinarily mobile mouth. He did not, however, use it to sneer with. He smiled at the detectives and to Weigand said, “Hello, Lieutenant.

  “The boys said you wanted me,” he reported. “Took me right out of the middle of a piece about wills for probate. You picked a very fortunate time, Lieutenant.”

  Schwartz had been fortifying himself with a drink or two. But he was a long way from drunk on them.

  “Not,” he added, “that it wouldn’t be pleasant at any time to hear that somebody had done in Victor Leeds Sproul.”

  “Why?” Weigand asked, with great simplicity.

  And then, quite suddenly, the long, easy-going man was no longer easy-going.

  “Because,” he said, “Sproul was as unmitigated a bastard as I’ve ever known. He was—”

  Schwartz seemed suddenly to blaze as he continued his description of the dead lecturer. It was a strange, unaccountable spectacle. Sproul was this and Sproul was that; he was a windbag and he was a crook; he weaseled in where nobody wanted him.

  “Where?” Weigand put in.

  “My life,” Schwartz told him. “Everybody’s girl. My girl’s life; everybody’s girl’s.”

  He broke off, suddenly cooling. He looked as if he wished he had cooled earlier. But then he shrugged.

  “What the hell?” he said. “You’d find out anyway.”

  “Sproul got my wife to leave me,” he said. “Got her to divorce me, so he could marry her. Only he didn’t plan to marry her.” He paused again, and smiled a little crookedly. “It leaves a guy prejudiced,” he said. “I was right prejudiced against Mr. Sproul.”

  “I see you were,” Weigand said. “Who was your wife?”

  “Loretta,” Schwartz said. “Loretta Shaw she calls herself now. Loretta Schwartz as was.”

  “They’re the damnedest bunch,” Mullins said, rather helplessly. “A bunch of bed-hoppers.”

  Weigand nodded. He said the whole crowd seemed to get around.

  The bomb-shell had been Schwartz’s chief contribution. He had been at the dinner, getting time off.

  “I sort of liked to watch that monkey,” he said.

  Nothing out of the way had happened at the dinner; everybody had been polite and friendly. Sproul had been much as he usually was. Schwartz was of the opinion that somebody had killed the lecturer, but evidently only on the basis that he needed killing. But if Sproul had contemplated suicide, he would have planned it as spectacularly as possible. He had known Sproul in Paris, where he was working with him for a time on the Herald. It was during those days, near the end of them, that Sproul had persuaded Loretta Schwartz to leave her husband and become Loretta Shaw, as preparation—so she supposed?—for becoming Loretta Sproul.

  “And there’s a guy with a grudge,” Mullins said, when they came to George Schwartz in their checking over.

  Weigand nodded.

  “With grounds for a grudge, anyway,” he agreed. “And obviously a man who is sore. But a murder grudge, Sergeant?”

  That, they agreed, was what they didn’t know. Not yet.

  Schwartz’s long, independent legs had carried him out of the little room off the stage of the Today’s Topics Club and, after a pause, Loretta Shaw’s slender, pretty legs had carried her in. They had carried her in decisively, because she was in readiness for the question. Inevitably, Weigand realized, she would be in readiness for the question. But that was no reason for not asking it.

  “So you used to be married to Schwartz?” Weigand said. “And you ditched him for Sproul?”

  “So what?” the girl said, very ready. “Is it something that never happened before?”

  Weigand agreed that it wasn’t. But he was not as amiable as he had been.

  “Girls leave poor men for men with more money,” he agreed. “Obscure men for prominent men. It happens.”

  The girl flushed, just perceptibly. But she entered no denial.

  “So what?” she said.

  Weigand shrugged. So nothing, of necessity.

  “It would be simpler, however,” he told her, “if people would volunteer information we are bound to get anyway. Simpler for them. It doesn’t matter to us.” He looked at her, deliberately and without expression. “We have plenty of time,” he told her. “All the time in the world. If we need it.”

  “You’re comical,” the girl told him. “Completely comical.”

  Weigand was u
nperturbed. He even agreed that it was possible. As an individual, thinking what he was thinking, wondering in a new direction. But as a policeman—no.

  “The police are not comic, Miss Shaw,” he told her. “Don’t fool yourself.”

  That, she told him, was what he thought. She had plenty of animosity. Now, she wanted to know, what did he do?

  He smiled at her, indifferent to the bait. He did not answer directly, but said only that she could go. She would, he added, stay in town, because he would have other questions from time to time.

  “Comical questions,” he said. “Anything for a laugh. That’s all, Miss Shaw.”

  She went. When her back was turned, Weigand nodded to Mullins, who went behind her to the door and nodded over her head to Detective Stein. Stein gave no sign of noticing, but as she went down the aisle toward the exit he spoke, casually enough, to Detective Flannery, who was a small man for a policeman and not conspicuous. Flannery put his hat on and went down the aisle too, like a man going nowhere in particular. Mullins, standing in the door, nodded approvingly and looked at a short list in his hand and said:

  “Which one of you’s White—Ralph White?”

  A tall, plump man, with a heavy face shaped like a piece of dough, said he was White. Mullins jerked a directing head and White passed him and went into the little room. Mullins came behind him and said:

  “Mr. Ralph White, Lieutenant. One of the guys who knew Sproul.”

  “Did you, Mr. White?” Weigand inquired. He was very pleasant again. His eyes suggested a chair.

  White had a heavy, buttered voice; he reminded Weigand of somebody in the past and after a moment Weigand remembered who. It didn’t matter, because the other man was dead. He had died rather suddenly one evening around eleven o’clock, in a manner he had been permitted to anticipate in a cell for thirteen months and seven days.

  Which meant, Weigand reminded himself, nothing whatever about Mr. White. It was a type—the pompous and pontifical, who ran to fatness of person and of phraseology. This did not, Weigand told himself with increasing firmness, mean that representatives of the type ran also to murder.