Death Takes a Bow

by Frances Lockridge

  “Interested,” Mrs. North said. “Don’t they read the papers?”

  “—upset,” Mr. North finished. “Obviously, darling. But they’ll expect me to mention it. I mean, our most popular author dies on a lecture platform just after I’ve introduced him and I’ll have to say something about it, obviously. Something like, ‘By the way, too bad about poor old Sproul, wasn’t it. You could have knocked me over with the gavel.’ Something like that. Oh, lord!”

  “What?” Mrs. North said, preparing to get up.

  “The number of times I’ll have to tell all about it,” Jerry North said, with a slight moan in his voice. “From T. G. down.”

  “To Y. Z.,” Mrs. North suggested, stepping out of pajamas and looking at herself in the long door mirror. “I’m gaining again, I’m afraid. What happened to A. B.?”

  “Fired,” Mr. North said, looking at her appreciatively. “I don’t see it.”

  “Here,” Mrs. North said, slapping herself there. “I always liked to think of A. B. up there, busy as—”

  “All right,” Mr. North told her. “Not before breakfast. Anyway, I think it’s something to throw to the nieces.”

  “Oh, lord!” Mrs. North said. She stood on one foot, ready to put the other through her girdle, and stared at Mr. North. “I forgot all about them.” She looked at him reproachfully. “I was feeling so good,” she added. “And you brought up the nieces.”

  “Really, Pam,” Jerry said. “I didn’t.”

  Pamela North finished with the girdle, wriggling.

  “They’re nice, of course,” she said. “And I love them. I guess. Only a whole day with the nieces. Fighting off sailors, probably. Why do you suppose sailors?”

  “Sailors are fine,” Jerry told her. “I was a sailor once.”

  “You must have been cute,” Pam said. “I wish I’d known you then.”

  “Nobody knew me then,” Mr. North said, morosely. “Even my best friends. They’re nice girls, Pam. A little—well, maybe a little inexperienced. If they happen to run into a—well, a troublesome sailor they’ll scoot for home. And most sailors will understand. Even if they do look older.” He paused. “Beth particularly,” he noted. “She’s—appreciably older.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. North said, “except maybe her mind. And you and Bill will be hunting murderers and I’ll just be showing the nieces Grant’s Tomb. Do you suppose they’ll like Grant’s Tomb?”

  “No,” Jerry said. “Try Twenty-one. Or the Algonquin bar.”

  “I always feel under water in the Algonquin bar,” Mrs. North noted, finishing a second stocking and twisting to see the seam in the mirror. “And anyway, not bars.”

  Jerry said he supposed not and swung out of bed.

  “I still think you ought to get cold,” Mrs. North observed, looking at him. “No, I suppose not bars. What do you really think about my Mrs. Williams theory.”

  We hadn’t, Jerry told her, been thinking about it at all. He would. He paused, clad now in shorts, and assumed an expression of thought.

  “Not much,” he said.

  “No,” Pam said. “It doesn’t seem so good this morning. But still—Still, it was funny. And one funny thing leads to another.”

  Murder, Jerry pointed out, wasn’t funny. Pam told him not to stickle.

  “Strange,” she said. “Abnormal. Twisted.”

  Jerry North really thought about Mrs. Williams. The word “twisted” seemed to have started him.

  “Assuming,” he said, “that you haven’t made a mistake, that it was really Mrs. Williams you saw.” He nodded at Pam. “And I think it was,” he said, rather hurriedly. “I know you don’t make mistakes, of that kind. Assuming it was Mrs. Williams, it does indicate that Mrs. Williams isn’t what she appears to be.”

  “What she’s arranged to appear to be,” Pam told him. “Because if ever I saw a woman who arranged—”

  “Arranged to appear to be,” Mr. North agreed. “But it would be easy to carry the assumption too far. Anywhere you’d carry it, without knowing more, would be too far. Maybe she’s just a girl with a yen, who has another side to face the world with. As per Browning. Maybe it’s just another instance of murder—of any sudden, violent, interruption of ordinary things—cutting through lives and showing you cross-sections.”

  He looked at Pam, who was pulling her dress down. It was a sheer woolen dress in pale orange. Or something Mr. North decided he would call pale orange. Pam looked at herself in the mirror.

  “Probably,” she said. “I smell bacon. Martha’s here.” She looked at Jerry thoughtfully. “Still,” she said. “You’ll have to admit that it’s funny about Mrs. Williams. Whatever you say. It’s a discrepancy.”

  Jerry said all right, it was a discrepancy. He plugged in his electric razor, and its buzz shut him off from the outer world. Pam watched him for a moment and went out of the bedroom. The table was set up in the dining room corner of the living room, and set properly for four. In the kitchen there was a reassuring sound of pans in action. Pamela looked in.

  The nieces sat side by side on a single chair, which was the only chair available, and watched Martha, with anticipation. The two young cats sat on the floor, their tails wrapped carefully around them, and looked up at Martha hopefully. It was, Pam decided, a pretty picture.

  “But tautological, somehow,” she said. “They all look just the same, essentially. I’ll certainly have to keep an eye out for strange dogs.”

  “Aunt Pam,” Beth said. “It’s raining. What do we do today?”

  It was, Pam admitted to herself, a question. She found an unexpected answer.

  “One thing,” she said, “I’m going to take you to lunch at a very interesting place.”

  “That will be nice,” Margie said, politely.

  Nice wasn’t, Pam thought, precisely the right word for the Roundabout. But it wouldn’t be un-nice, at least for luncheon. It wasn’t, of course, really a luncheon place. It was merely a point from which a wild goose chase might be started.

  “But,” Pam said to herself, “I’ve got to begin somewhere. Because I still think there’s something in it.”

  She looked at the nieces. They were darlings, of course. But they were obviously going to cramp her style.

  Lieutenant Weigand drove to his office morosely, through driving rain. He wanted more sleep, his head ached and he felt peculiarly incompetent. He also felt a grumbling desire to get his hands on the man—little and dark, or large and pale—who had provided both the headache and the conviction of inadequacy. He picked up newspapers and carried them to his office and regarded them without favor. Even with the war, the sudden and mysterious death of Victor Leeds Sproul was being well noticed. Top heads, front page, even in the Times. That would make Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley sit up and take notice.

  Weigand sat down, rubbed his head reflectively and spread out the lecture notes which his assailant had left in exchange. Fair exchange hell, Weigand told himself. I owe him a large bump. He felt his bump. A very large bump, he told himself. The telephone rang. Weigand said, “Yes, Inspector,” into it and went down the corridor to beard O’Malley. O’Malley said it looked as if he’d got into something.

  “Again,” the Inspector added, puffing a little. He regarded the lieutenant with accusation. “See those Norths are still around,” he remarked. “Maybe we’d better swear them in.”

  It was, Weigand told him, mere accident. It simply happened. O’Malley said it seemed to happen a good deal. The thought evidently did not amuse O’Malley, who continued to look upon Weigand without affection. Then Inspector O’Malley rallied.

  “All right,” Inspector O’Malley said. “Got to get on with it, Lieutenant. Let’s have it.”

  Weigand let him have it. He omitted the invasion of the night. There was no use upsetting O’Malley. When he finished, O’Malley looked at him and said, “What the hell?”

  “He bumped himself,” O’Malley announced. “Whoever heard of morphine in a homicide?”

&nb
sp; Weigand pointed out that it was an odd way to commit suicide—an odd time and an odd place; an action oddly without reason so far determined.

  “You think somebody got him?” O’Malley wanted to know. “It’s a hell of a lot funnier way to kill somebody.”

  Weigand agreed with that. Still, considering everything, he thought it was murder. He realized that he was holding back; that he had been sure it was murder ever since things had gone bump in the night. But there are some things about lieutenants that inspectors should never learn. The inspector would not like to hear that somebody had entered Weigand’s apartment, knocked out Weigand and Mrs. Weigand, and gone his way at leisure. It would arouse doubts in the inspector. It aroused doubts in Weigand.

  “They’re giving it a play,” O’Malley noticed, waving at a newspaper on his desk. “Quite a play, considering. We won’t look so bright if it turns out suicide.”

  O’Malley liked to look bright in the newspapers. He liked sentences which began: “Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley of the Homicide Squad, in charge of the investigation of the death of Victor Leeds Sproul, said today—” He regarded it as the duty of Acting Captain Weigand to provide him with appropriate things to say. It was the role of an acting captain.

  “It’s murder,” Weigand told him.

  O’Malley hinted that Weigand had better be right. He said that, assuming it was murder, who? This—this Bandelman Tchung?

  “Jung,” Weigand said. “Not Tchung.”

  The inspector looked at him aggrieved.

  “Call that a name?” he wanted to know.

  Weigand shook his head.

  “I think he made it up,” he agreed.

  “He’s your man,” O’Malley said, with conviction. “Bandelman Tchung. My God!”

  You couldn’t, Weigand pointed out, arrest a man merely because you didn’t believe in his name. O’Malley, red of face, rectified this misconception. You could arrest a man for anything and make him spill it. In the old days—The trouble with you young cops is—

  “Baby ’em,” O’Malley said. “That’s what it is. Baby ’em. When I was your age, Bill—”

  Weigand listened with expressions of interest. At proper moments he nodded. When once O’Malley paused for a word, Lieutenant Weigand provided it. “Squeamish.” Several times Weigand said, “Right.” After a time O’Malley quieted himself.

  “Well,” he said, “what’re you going to do? Sit here all day passing? Get on with it, Lieutenant. Get on with it!”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Any special lines?”

  Did he, O’Malley wanted to know, have to do everything himself? Did he have to lead Weigand by the hand?

  “Right,” Weigand said. Arty was in fine form. It cheered Weigand to discover in O’Malley an unchanging verity. Weigand left. O’Malley lighted a cigar, put his feet up, and returned to the sports pages.

  Weigand stared at Sproul’s lecture notes. He laid them aside and stared at reports, which were incomplete. Unless Loretta Shaw had gone out of a rear window of her apartment in Bank Street and climbed down a fire escape ladder, she had not showed up around 3 o’clock to slug Bill Weigand and Dorian. She was accounted for, the accounting rendered by a detective who had got himself surprisingly wet in the process. It had begun to rain at around 4 o’clock, if Headquarters was interested. Jung was back in his lodging in a rooming house in the West Forties, but it was not quite clear when he had arrived. Somebody had slipped up, there. The others—the Akrons, Schwartz, Burden, Ralph White and such unlikely sluggers as Mrs. Paul Williams and Dr. Dupont, might have done anything, having been unobserved.

  Sproul had died of an overdose of morphine, and had had a moderately bad heart. That made it official. He had been male, white and weighed 210 pounds; in life he had been six feet, one inch tall. He had been—

  Weigand grew interested. Sproul had been born in Centerburg, Iowa, in 1896. His father had run a feed store. Sproul had gone to school in Centerburg and to high school and, the feed business apparently proving profitable, to the state university.

  He had been—and Weigand lifted eyebrows in amusement—graduated from the School of Agriculture. So Victor Leeds Sproul, the suave taster of the elegant, was a farmer at heart. Apparently it had remained at heart; there was no record that he had farmed. He had been drafted in the other war, but had not got overseas. He had, however, got to New York. The record thereafter was incomplete; men were working on it. It was slow work, his parents being dead and Centerburg being far off. But there were ways, and they were being tried. Even with the most likely avenue—the official records of the French Republic—closed, there were ways. There would be people who had known Sproul when. There were always people who had known everybody when. But it might take time to find them.

  This didn’t, Weigand thought, looking out the window at the streaming rain, look like being a quick one. There was a good deal, come down to it, to be said for the family murder, with suspects conveniently cooped together. Or, if you were to have murder, for any circumstances similarly restricting. This one looked like being all over the place. However.…

  He left the other dossiers, most of them incomplete but growing, until later. He spread the dozen sheets of Sproul’s lecture notes out in front of him and began a scrutiny. He began it hopefully, sustained by a theory—the theory of the most likely. Assuming Sproul had been murdered, as and when he was, the most likely reason was that he had been about to say something in his lecture which somebody did not want said. If that proved true, it would explain a good deal of the good deal which needed explanation.

  Sproul had planned to begin, it appeared, with innocuous praise of a people and of a nation and of a nation’s way of life. “Centuries look down,” he had evidently planned to quote, and he had capitalized “Continuity of time.” You could reconstruct, Weigand found—in Paris, as you went about your foolish business in her streets, history looked down on you from ancient buildings and echoed in famous streets; along this road Villon had walked and great kings ridden; down this crooked lane you might have heard anguished cries on the eve of St. Bartholomew’s Day and here tumbrils jounced on cobbles. You drew from these things, Sproul might have been going to say, a renewed sense of the continuity of life and of civilization, and perhaps he might have meant to add that barbarians had been this way before, and vanished finally, leaving no trace.

  There was nothing in this, as it appeared, to prompt murder. It might have been eloquent, if Sproul was eloquent, and probably he was. It might also, like most eloquent things, have been a little obvious at the core. But audiences had grown exigent if they murdered to deflect the obvious. Weigand turned to the next page. Sproul had, about there, planned to come down to the present. History lived in these streets and buildings; so did the contemporary. “Heard of the Left Bank—maybe too much,” one note ran. “Apologize—but lived there many years—it, too, part of way of life gone” … “Variety of people … all over world. Spoon River.…”

  That was not so obvious. Spoon River? Weigand looked at it. Spoon River?

  The Spoon River Anthology, of course; the only Spoon River of which Weigand had ever heard. Edgar Lee Masters. But Masters, about then, had been living, Weigand dimly recalled—having known a man who knew a man—in New York. At a rather odd place in Sixteenth Street, the man who knew a man had said. And—but of course it was obvious. Sproul had intended, almost certainly, to do his own Spoon River Anthology on the people he had known in the Paris days. He would say—or would that be too obvious? Weigand’s eyes traveled on. It had not been too obvious. Seine River Anthology. Weigand’s interest quickened.

  Brief, probably acid, summaries of lives. That would be the idea. Not in free verse, one could assume; prose vignettes, quite possibly intended to take the skin off and hang it to the barn door. A project to which skin owners might be expected to object. Names? Weigand’s eyes went on. Not names. Letters. The inevitable Mr. A., the infinitely to be expected Miss B. Here—and then Weigand’s eyes st
opped abruptly and he made a pessimistic remark about his ultimate future. He made it in a tone of honest surprise.

  Somebody had been ahead of him, and that he had known. But he had not supposed that his predecessor through the pages of Mr. Sproul’s notes would leave markers, as if Weigand were following a paper chase. But that was what his predecessor had done. He had drawn, of all things, a little arrow pointing toward “Mr. A.” and he had gone to the further trouble of underlining the notes which apparently referred to Mr. A. Faint pencil marks called Lieutenant Weigand’s attention.

  Somebody, and evidently somebody who held Weigand’s intelligence in notably low esteem, wanted to make matters very clear. Somebody wanted to be helpful. The police department had enlisted, quite without volition, an anonymous assistant. Weigand, after again remarking that he would be damned, followed the penciled lines. The notes here read:

  “Odd people among—give some examples—all like a bit of gossip.… Mr. A., example—farm boy from Iowa—educated crop rotation—by wits” (Lived by wits?)—“authority on sophistication—but used to sneak off—”

  “Hell,” Weigand said. There was nothing there; nothing but a joke on the audience. Mr. Sproul had started his anthology with a vignette of Mr. Sproul. Very comical; very—ingrained was the word. A man for the secret joke, the no longer joking Mr. Sproul. Why had the anonymous adviser thought it worth while to draw Weigand’s attention to Mr. A.? Unless—Weigand paused to consider the “unless.” Unless the adviser, who presumably was the same person who had used a blackjack on the Weigands, wanted to indicate that Mr. Sproul was Mr. Sproul’s own murderer. Or unless Mr. A. only appeared to be Mr. Sproul, so that references to him constituted a joke within a joke. The idea intensified Weigand’s headache and he stared broodingly at the typed notes. He shrugged and returned to them.

  Where Mr. A. had sneaked was to one of the American style restaurants which used to dot Paris in the tourist days, where the homesick might get ham and eggs and, if fortune favored acutely, corn on the cob. That was the secret about Mr. A., apparently—the yearning of the Iowa farm boy for the products of the Iowa farm. Not a vital secret, on the surface. No more revealing, in essence, than would be the yearning of a boy from Marseilles for bouillabaisse. Although Americans of a certain habit of thought might think it revealed more. Mr. A. was, he would take it, Mr. Sproul himself and Mr. Sproul had not murdered Mr. Sproul to keep him from giving Mr. Sproul away. Weigand reached in his pocket, took out a flat box of aspirins, and swallowed a few. He went on to Miss B. Miss B. was also underlined. Weigand let his eyes hurry along; they were all underlined; all these alphabetical anonymities. The adviser had played no favorites. He went back to Miss B. The notes were cryptic, which was understandable. Too cryptic? There was that discouraging possibility. However—