“Morocco,” Jerry told her. “I was there, and I didn’t.”
“You,” Pam told him, “were looking at the girl without any clothes. The dancer. With the skinny legs.”
“Well,” Mr. North said, judicially. “Skinny?”
Pam looked at him.
“Of course,” she said, “they do say it’s the dangerous age. For men.”
“Do they—Beth?” Mr. North said. “Or was it Margie? And they weren’t skinny. Just—slender.”
“All right,” Pam said. “Jerry—are the girls going to be all right? Or an awful responsibility?”
“All right,” Jerry told her. “And a responsibility. They’re sweet children, but they’re curious. Naturally. Weren’t you?”
“Terribly,” Pam admitted. She thought it over, and looked worried. “From about ten,” she said. “I sometimes wonder.”
Jerry told her that she needn’t. It was natural. And Beth and Margie were of an age to wonder, and reach out inquiring fingers toward the fire. And to draw fingers back and run back to childhood at the faintest actual heat.
“How do you know?” Pam asked. Jerry shrugged.
“I can’t prove it,” he said. “But that’s the way they are. It sticks out all over them. Don’t worry, Pam.” He diverted her. “About Mrs. Williams,” he said.
“Oh,” Pam said. “She was like Ruffy.” She looked at Ruffy, still languorous on her back. “In essence,” she amplified. “She’d had some drinks and she was with a man she liked and—you know. She looked it. Only, more than most people. In public, anyway. Enough more to notice. And when I saw her today, it didn’t seem possible. But it was, so there’s something—something odd. A discrepancy. Isn’t there?”
If she was right, Jerry admitted, there was a discrepancy. If she was right, Mrs. Williams was not what one at first sight guessed her to be. But that was all it came to. It had nothing to do with them.
“Or with Sproul,” he added. “Unless Sproul was the man?”
“Oh no,” Pam said. “It wasn’t Mr. Sproul. It wasn’t anybody—anybody concerned, I mean. It was just a man. Rather good looking, with a straight nose and broad shoulders and—”
“Well,” Jerry North said, “they do say it’s the dangerous age. For women.”
Pam made a face at him. She said that, being human, a girl couldn’t help noticing. She said she didn’t really like straight noses.
“Yours is much better,” she told him. “Why doesn’t it matter? If somebody is strange—not what they should be—in a murder case, it always matters. Bill says so.”
“All right, darling,” Jerry said. “It matters, Mrs. Williams killed Mr. Sproul because she made calf eyes at a man with straight shoulders and a broad nose. And I’m going to bed.”
Pam said she didn’t see how he could, with so much going on, but all right and she would be along in a minute. Jerry went and as he undressed reflected hazily on his own psychological vagaries. Because, Jerry thought, I am not feeling at all the way I should expect myself to feel. I ought to be stirred up and excited, because of Sproul’s murder, and I am merely tired and rather sleepy and—yes, relaxed.
Remarkably relaxed, Jerry thought, stretching out in the twin bed nearest the door. Which merely proved that a man’s own nerves were shamefully egocentric and that they didn’t, really, care at all what happened to other people. Whatever the mind may say, Jerry reflected, dreamily.
Because, he thought, my nerves are lying down and purring because the speech is all over. It doesn’t matter how it ended, or what happened to Sproul, because my nerves don’t give a damn about anybody but me. A nerve’s love, Jerry thought; there’s nothing in the world like the love of a nerve for its body. Whistler’s nerve. It isn’t that I’m callous, really, but just that my nerves don’t care. If it came down to it, I’d make a speech every day to keep anybody from being murdered and anybody would, but that isn’t what the nerves care about. The nerves are primo—prime—the nerves don’t give a twinge what happens to anybody else and—
“What?” Jerry’s mind came back, bumping, from the stream of sleepiness in which it was floating.
“Are you asleep?” Pam asked again. “Because if you are I don’t want to wake you and I’ll be very quiet. Only I want to know what you really think.”
“Think?” Jerry said.
“You were asleep,” Pam said. “Go right back.”
“Think about what?” Jerry demanded.
“Never mind, dear,” Pam said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Apparently Pam had come in and undressed while he was thinking about his nerves, because now she was in the other bed. Jerry sat up in his bed and looked at her excitedly.
“Think about what?” he demanded. “Think about what, for heaven’s sake?”
“What?” Pam said, a little mistily. “Jerry. I was just getting set to sleep, like a bud.”
“Bud?” Jerry repeated, running a hand through his hair. “What do I think about a bud?”
“Never mind,” Pam said. “You’re sleeping. I can tell. I mean sleep was setting like a bud; like a plant getting set to bud. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Jerry took a firm grip on himself, beginning with his hair. He spoke slowly and carefully. He said, “Listen, dear.”
“Listen, dear,” Jerry said. “I was asleep. You wake me up to ask what I think. Then you talk about a bud. Then you say wait until morning. What is all this?”
“Go to sleep, darling,” Pam said. “You’ll wake the nieces.” Then she listened. Then she said, “Why, Jerry!”
Jerry turned on the light.
“What,” he said, “do I think about what?” He said it with a kind of grim resolution.
“Oh,” Pam said. “I’ve almost for—oh, Mrs. Williams, I guess. Do you think she murdered Mr. Sproul?”
“No,” Jerry said. “I do not think she murdered Mr. Sproul.”
“I do,” Pam said. “Or maybe I don’t, really. But I think she’s eligible. Because of the discrepancy. But I want to go to sleep now. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
“Pam,” Jerry said.
“Please, darling,” Pam said. “Not tonight. I’m just ready to fall off. Can’t it wait until morning? Then we’ll talk as much as you want to. About Mrs. Williams and buds and everything. I’ve had such a day, Jerry. Nieces and—everything.”
The last word unexpectedly trailed off. Jerry waited a moment and realized there was no doubt about it. Pamela had, with the graceful ease of a young cat, gone to sleep while she was still talking. Jerry looked at her and thought she looked very nice and turned off the light and lay down. He lay very quietly, ready to welcome sleep. He lay for a long time, ready to welcome sleep, and listened to Pam’s easy, sleepy breathing and waited for his nerves to relax. And he had never, he grimly discovered, felt more wide awake in his life. There was nothing to indicate that he was ever going to sleep again.
He did, eventually. Not really very long after the banjo clock struck two, in tones to waken the dead.
An hour or more earlier Bill Weigand swept his notes together,” wadded them into a pocket and said they might as well call it a night. At that time he knew that Loretta Shaw had gone downtown to her apartment in Bank Street; that George Schwartz had seen her there and taken the subway back uptown, presumably for his long vacant chair on a copy desk rim, and that Mr. Bandelman Jung, with slightly suspicious skill, had lost his tail in the Grand Central Station. Or had he not been skilful, but merely done, unsuspectingly and by chance, one of the things with which no detective, however able, can single-handedly cope?
Bill Weigand took Dorian, who was waiting, and drove downtown in the Buick to their new apartment just off Washington Square, and within a block or two of the Norths’. Dorian’s head subsided on his shoulder after a few blocks, and he looked down at her fondly and wished for a world in which there were fewer murders to distract a man from things which were really important. And he thought, ruefully, tha
t when—and if—Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley discovered what had happened to Sproul’s lecture notes there might be, for him, markedly fewer murders. Then he brightened. Perhaps O’Malley would then approve his resignation, and he could take the intelligence majority which the army dangled in front of him. If O’Malley did, the Commissioner might make an exception to his stern rule that resignations from the force for army duty were unacceptable.
7
Friday, 3:15 A.M. to 10:20 A.M.
It happened, Bill Weigand afterward argued to himself, because it was too early in the case for anything to happen. It was after you had a line, when you were beginning to put the heat on, that, as a policeman, you needed to watch your step. Not when you had merely some rather confusing information about some people who had known a man who might have been murdered. Or maybe, Weigand had to add: it happened merely because he was himself half asleep. But however it happened, it was hard to forgive.
It began at 3:15 in the morning with a ringing which Weigand, inured as a general practitioner to inconvenient summonses, at first supposed to be related to the telephone. He reached the telephone with one hand, without waking up, and answered it before he realized that the ringing continued. So it was the doorbell. Weigand waited a moment longer and Dorian said, “Something’s ringing, Bill.”
“Right,” Bill said, and climbed sleepily out of bed and groped for the door release button, in its unfamiliar location in the new apartment. He found it, started to press it, and remembered his own advice to the Norths, who lived in a similar walkup: “Always call down before you click.”
“Hello,” Weigand yelled into the transmitter embedded in the black box. “Who is it?”
The black box said something unrecognizable in an amorphous voice. “What?” Weigand called.
“Message,” the voice said. “Headquarters.”
Or that was, afterward, what Weigand thought the voice said. In any event, it was at the time as much as his own voice was worth to try for more specific information. He had followed advice; he had called before he clicked. He clicked and, two flights down, heard the outside door open. He waited, trying to come awake, during the time it would take a messenger from headquarters to climb to their floor. Then, as innocently as any civilian, Lieutenant William Weigand, acting captain in the Homicide Squad, opened his own front door and stuck his head out. He supposed, afterward, that he stuck his head out with some faint idea of confining the conversation to the outer hall, thus not disturbing Dorian more than needed to be.
There was no conversation. There was an explosion somewhere, and an instant of dizziness and not quite time for an instant of nausea. And then there was nothing. And then there was violent pain in the head, and a longer period of dizziness and the groping realization that he had been expertly knocked out by someone who had—yes, fingers confirmed the guess—laid a blackjack behind his left ear. Just hard enough, not quite too hard.
Weigand’s mind swirled for a moment in darkness; darkness eddied around him. Then, when he knew he was conscious, the darkness remained. It was objective darkness. He was lying on a carpet. He was lying on the hall carpet in his own apartment and the hall was black.
Weigand staggered as he stood up and groped on a half familiar wall for a light switch, and then he remembered. Then, in a tight voice, he called “Dorian!” and, when there was no answer, “Dorian!” And then he thought he heard a moan.
The light came on. He was alone in the hall. He was running the short length of the empty hall toward the bedroom, and terror was running with him—riding in his mind, clutching at his throat. “Dorian!” he called again, and his voice was desperate.
Dorian lay across her bed, slender and motionless, her curved body quiet under thin silk. Weigand was beside her, and fear was cold in his chest, before she moaned again. It was a faint moan, but it was a sound for which Bill Weigand would have prayed if there had been time for prayer. Then Dorian’s eyes opened, and the green was clear in them, and they were puzzled.
“Bill!” Dorian Weigand said, and her tone was strange and puzzled. “Bill. What made you hit me?”
It was all right then, or in a few minutes it was all right. Because now Bill Weigand, without ceasing to be a terrified lover, became a reasoning policeman with an ingrained knowledge of contusions and lacerations, and almost a physician’s knowledge of what to do about them first. Dorian had only a contusion. Somebody had laid a blackjack neatly, with just the force needed, behind her right ear.
“We’re going to have a fine pair of headaches,” Bill told her, holding her in his arms.
“Going to?” Dorian said, still a little faintly. “Going to? If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
That, Weigand thought, becoming almost all policeman, was certainly the point. Who had walked into the apartment of a police lieutenant, knocked out the lieutenant and the lieutenant’s wife, and proceeded to—But what had he proceeded to do? Bill Weigand laid his wife gently down on the bed again, turned on the lights and looked at her to be sure she was all right, and decided she was fine any way you looked at her, and searched the room with his eyes.
Apparently the invader who thought nothing of knocking out policemen and the wives of policemen had, thereafter, done nothing at all. The room showed no signs of any invader. Weigand looked puzzled, and felt puzzled, and stepped down the hall and turned on the lights in the living room. All was serene. His dressing-room study was likewise unmarked by invasion. He left the kitchen until later and returned. He said it was damned funny. He looked around the room again, and saw his suit jacket hanging on the back of a chair.
“Damn!” he said again, and crossed to it. He rammed his hand into the pocket where he had put his notes, and the hand came out clutching a sheaf of papers. Not even that—
Then the papers felt wrong and he looked at them. He stared at them unbelievingly and made low, angry sounds.
“What is it?” Dorian said, sitting up. “Ouch!”
“It will go away,” Bill told her. “We’ll try aspirin after a bit. The so-and-so took my notes.”
“Notes?” Dorian said. “The ones you made tonight.”
“Right,” Bill said. “The ones I made tonight. But he made a fair exchange.”
“Which is no robbery,” Dorian told him. “Of what, Bill?”
“This,” Bill said, waving it. “The notes Sproul made for his lecture. The notes somebody grabbed earlier when I was asleep at the switch.” He stared at her unhappily. “Which,” he said, “is where I seem to stay. Damn.”
“Get me some aspirin, Bill,” Dorian told him. “I can’t think. Can you?”
He didn’t, Bill Weigand told her, want to. He had no pleasant thoughts. He got the aspirin and a glass of water. They took aspirin and water. Weigand sat on the edge of the bed, holding the water glass angled in his hand, so that the little water remaining began comfortably to drip to the carpet. He shook his head, said “Ouch!” and remarked that he didn’t get it.
“Somebody,” he said, “goes to all the trouble of stealing the lecture notes. A little dark man, presumably. He finds out they aren’t what he wants. So what does he do? Throw them away? No, he goes to a lot of trouble to see that I get them back, but in exchange he steals the notes I made this evening. Which won’t do him any good that I can see. What kind of a murderer is that?”
“I don’t know,” Dorian said. “Maybe it isn’t one. Maybe it’s somebody who’s just—sort of curious.”
“He’s sure as hell curious,” Weigand said. “He’s curious in a big way.”
“Will your notes do him any good?” Dorian wanted to know.
Weigand said he couldn’t think of any. They were merely jottings, taken to fix in his mind certain points he thought might prove important. They amounted to a kind of summary of the verbatim notes Mullins had taken. Gaining them did the intruder no good that Weigand could think of, and did him no harm.
“Beyond the considerable embarrassment,” he said, grinning without gr
eat amusement.
They thought about it.
“All I can see,” Dorian said, “is that it’s somebody who wants to keep abreast of things. Know how the investigation is going, and what people say. And—” She broke off, and looked puzzled.
“And,” Bill finished for her, “wants me to keep abreast of things, too. Or he wouldn’t have returned the lecture notes.”
“Maybe,” Dorian suggested, “it’s another detective. From a rival firm.”
She said it lightly and then stopped rather suddenly and looked at her husband with an intent expression. He looked back, touched his bruise, reflective, and said, “Ouch!” Then he heard her.
“A rival firm,” he repeated, and their eyes shared a theory. “Now do you suppose there’s a rival firm interested in Mr. Sproul? Who just came out of Paris on the run?”
Then his eyes held a doubtful expression.
“It doesn’t figure,” he said. “Because this guy’s being helpful. To me. He wants me to read Sproul’s notes.” He looked at them. “So,” he said, “I guess I’d better do what he wants.”
Pamela North awakened first and reached for the watch on the table between the beds. The watch said it was 8:15. Pamela thought herself over and decided that she felt fine.
“I think I’ll get up,” she announced and waited. There was a little pause and then Jerry, from a long distance off, said, “Huh?”
“I think I’ll get up,” Pam North repeated.
“Do,” Jerry said. “Come back in an hour and let me know how it works out.”
“It’s almost nine o’clock,” Mrs. North told her husband. “Aren’t you going in today?”
“Later,” Mr. North said. “A good deal later, please. Because—oh, damn!”
“What?” Mrs. North said. “Damn what?”
“Sproul,” Mr. North told her. “Or—I don’t mean Sproul really.”
“No,” Mrs. North said. “That’s out of our hands. You mean about Sproul.”
“I’ll have to tell them at the office,” Mr. North said. “They’ll be—”
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