Death Takes a Bow

by Frances Lockridge

  Because, without appearing to—without turning to each other, or making any of the physical movements of conversation—Mrs. Williams and the man on her left were talking. He was, from the rear, a not very tall man with dark hair, and he seemed to be looking at his drink while he talked. And Mrs. Williams was looking at her drink as she answered.

  It would be absurd, Pam realized, to call their conversation furtive. In the mirrored glare of the Roundabout it was impossible to be furtive, unless you chose to be, in a sense, publicly furtive. Mrs. Williams and the man were not concealing, or trying to conceal, the fact of their conversation. But neither were they advertising it. It occurred to Mrs. North that they were furtive with each other, rather than with the world outside; as if the concealment lay between them, rather than between them and others. But that, Pam North thought, ordering abstractly and keeping her eyes on the two at the bar, was speculation. Of the worst kind. Because they might be, and probably were, merely abstracted; the effect of furtiveness grew out of her imagination, and out of the intentness with which Mrs. Williams and the man—a client?—were weighing what they said to one another.

  So the choice of the Roundabout had, and continuing to watch them Pam grew surer of it, resulted in nothing, except the sharing of the noise of a great many other people and indifferent food served with flourishing elaborateness. The tomato juice came, canned and tepid in elaborate ice bowls.

  “Oh,” Beth said. “What lovely tomato juice. What a nice place, Aunt Pam.”

  Pam was surprised and almost showed it, and decided there was no occasion to show surprise.

  “Isn’t it?” she said. “So gay.”

  The man sitting on Mrs. Williams’ left half-turned his chair on its swivel, as if he were about to get down. He turned it away from Mrs. Williams, but he seemed still to be speaking to her. She shook her head, and then turned away so that Mrs. North could see her profile clearly.

  A girl who looked like a secretary during working hours was standing beside Mrs. Williams and holding out something, and by the color Mrs. North could see it was a telegram. Mrs. North’s mind sought an explanation—a story which would match the fact—and decided that the girl was Mrs. Williams’ secretary and that she had been told to bring to the restaurant any telegrams which came while Mrs. Williams was at lunch—and that was odd, unless Mrs. Williams had been expecting a telegram of considerable importance—and that the secretary had dutifully brought it.

  Still sitting with her profile toward Mrs. North, Mrs. Williams opened the telegram. It was short, evidently, because her eyes remained on it only for a moment. And it was important, evidently, because for an instant after she had read it, Mrs. Williams seemed to stare beyond it. Then she read it again.

  And then, and for an instant Mrs. North thought she must be imagining again, Mrs. Williams seemed to sway on her chair. While Mrs. North stared, and half started up to see better, Mrs. Williams swayed on her chair still more, until it was quite evidently not Mrs. North’s imagination. Mrs. Williams swayed to her left, and so toward the bar, and the man on her right, feeling the movement beside him, half turned and as Mrs. Williams sagged toward him, took her in his arms. It was clear and strange, and in slow motion.

  Mrs. North started up, pushing back the table, and the nieces looked at her, and then where she was looking.

  “Oh,” Beth said, “she’s sick. How awful.”

  Mrs. North, without thinking why she was doing it, went rapidly toward the bar, and Mrs. Williams. But you could not go very rapidly, because of the tables intervening, and of the mirror pillars between. She came around the last pillar and Mrs. Williams was still being held by the man on her right, who was looking at her in a surprised way and then at a captain who was hurrying toward them. And then Mrs. North stumbled.

  She tried to catch herself and failed quite to do so, and, falling, wondered how she could have been so stupid. She caught herself with her hands, but her head struck the floor too, and for a moment she stayed on the floor, dazed. But she was not hurt, and was getting up already when a waiter reached her.

  She shook her head, and said she was all right, and looked toward Mrs. Williams. Now Mrs. Williams was sitting up again, and the man who had been holding her had a relieved expression and she was shaking her head at the captain. Apparently Mrs. Williams was all right, too.

  Mrs. North went on to her and when she was close enough said, “Oh, Mrs. Williams.”

  Mrs. Williams looked at her a moment as if she did not know who she was and then said, “Oh, Mrs. North, isn’t it?” Then she smiled.

  “I’m perfectly all right,” she said. “A dizzy spell. I sometimes have them.” She looked at Mrs. North, taking in the situation. “It was nice of you,” she said. “But I’m perfectly all right. And to think that you fell.”

  That was nothing, Pam said. But now Mrs. Williams was not looking at her. Mrs. Williams was looking down at the floor, and then in her lap, and then she opened her purse and looked into it. She had lost something and wanted to find it, Pam thought. She’s looking for the telegram, and it’s gone. But it could only be gone if somebody had picked it up, and nobody in the little group around Mrs. Williams said anything about having picked it up. Either the secretary or the man with whom Mrs. Williams had been talking might have picked it up, Pam thought. But the secretary, who was making unnecessary motions of assisting Mrs. Williams out of the bar chair, was not handing her the telegram. And the man with dark hair, who had sat on Mrs. Williams’ left, was not there. Pamela North looked around for him, but she could not see him anywhere.

  Patently there was nothing she could do, except stand there smiling her vague good will, so she said she was glad that Mrs. Williams was all right and accepted Mrs. Williams’ rather vague smile of appreciation, and went back to her table, a waiter going along as if to help.

  The girls were sitting where she had left them, and their eyes were round.

  “Oh,” Beth said. “Aunt Pamela. You fell!”

  “Yes,” Pam said. “Yes, I fell. It was nothing.”

  “But,” Margie said. “Somebody tripped you. We saw him.”

  Pamela North stared at the girls and they both nodded.

  “Oh, yes,” Beth said. “Somebody tripped you. We saw him. A little dark man.”

  A little after one Weigand straightened his neck to get the kink out, looked at the results of his research—and of research done in his behalf—and decided it was time to go to lunch. He took Mullins with him, and explained matters to Mullins over the table. Matters needed explanation.

  For one thing, the Cincinnati business appeared to be a washout. George Schwartz was not wanted there by the police; so far as they had yet determined he was not particularly wanted there by anybody. He had worked on a newspaper there; he had been city editor. The police of Cincinnati were making reasonably discreet enquiries about that, casually asking newspapermen the police department knew unofficially. But certainly there had been no scandal about Schwartz and expense accounts which was general knowledge, or which had officially engaged the attention of the authorities. Schwartz had merely resigned as city editor one day and gone to Paris, carrying out a threat often made by newspapermen.

  Schwartz’s reputation in New York also was reasonably unblemished. If he drank a good deal, and there were intimations that he did drink a good deal, it did not interfere with his work. On the contrary; it seemed that he was highly thought of by his paper and, after two years on the “rim” was being considered, favorably, for a swing job in the “slot.” (Mullins said “huh?” to this. Weigand told him; a man on the rim of the copy desk reads copy; the man in the slot is the boss of the men on the rim. Mullins said, “Oh.”)

  This was research conducted in behalf of Weigand, which meant in behalf of Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, in charge—which meant the patient, dogged work of many anonymous men, some in blue uniforms and most without them, but with the marks of their trade on weather-beaten faces and mouths which were usually hard
and hands which looked as if they had been, often enough, heavy. Such men were digging after facts; were talking to waiters at the restaurant in which Sproul had eaten his last meal; were finding out just what he had had to drink at the Today’s Topics Club and who had served it to him and what chance there had been for glasses to be tampered with; were going doggedly, if in this instance not too patiently, about the probably hopeless task of finding out where the morphine came from.

  That, Mullins and Weigand agreed, was quite a little problem. Retailers of morphine were elusive and not inclined to communicate. Nor were they particularly interested, one way or the other, in the outcome of murder investigations in which they were not themselves concerned. The police had lines in. Here and there, in Harlem and on the West Side and in Yorkville, nervous, cringing little men found themselves looking fearfully up at phlegmatic, mahogany-faced men and hearing, with acute unhappiness, the news that the sergeant wanted to speak to them. This usually meant trouble for the little men, because, even if they could give no help in the issue immediately raised, any contact with the police meant trouble. For several it meant Welfare Island, and enforced cures for an ailment which few of them regarded as requiring cure.

  So far this had come to nothing, except to the little men involved. No line led to a peddler who had sold morphine to those concerned.

  “Who,” Mullins said, “do you figure in it, Loot?”

  Weigand took a pencil and started to write on the tablecloth. A waiter came over and said, “Please, Lieutenant, use this, huh?” and gave him a tablet of paper. Weigand wrote on the paper:

  Sproul, George Schwartz, Jean Akron, Ralph White, Burden, the Shaw girl, the L.D.M. and, after a moment’s pause, Herbert Akron, brother of Jean.

  “L.D.M.?” Mullins said. “Little dark—,” Weigand answered, before Mullins said, “Oh, sure.”

  Weigand thought a moment longer and, in deference to Mrs. North, wrote down the name of Mrs. Paul Williams. That, so far as they knew now, was the lot. It was too early to be sure, but if they were lucky the name of the murderer was on the list.

  “And,” Weigand said, “Sproul was going to say something about most of them in his lecture. If I’m right.”

  “Sure,” Mullins said loyally. “Sure.”

  You took, Weigand said, taking out a penciled list and running down it, “Mr. A.” to represent Sproul himself; “Miss B.” as the alias of Miss Akron; “Mr. C.” to be nobody they knew, and “Mr. D.” to be Mr. Schwartz, who was after all not wanted in Cincinnati. Then, leaving out others you could not place, as you could not place Mr. C., and guessing a good deal, you came out with this:

  “Mr. J.… glad-hander; modern Bar. Very dif. those days; by no means everybody’s fr … girl named Antoin. (ette?) and R. Seine … Accident?” Y. Charles Burden (because “modern Bar.” might mean “modern Barnum,” which would fit, in Sproul’s style, a lecture agent).

  “I don’t get it,” Mullins said. “What was he accusing Burden of, assuming it was Burden?”

  That, Weigand admitted, was generally the trouble. You were building on very little; you had cryptic hints of a story; here a cryptic hint about something which had happened to a girl named Antoinette, presumably in Paris, and to which Burden was somehow connected. Something which might have been an accident and, because of the question mark, might presumably not have been an accident. Most of the notes were similarly cryptic.

  There was, after Mr. J., a Mr. H. and the notes regarding him read: “Lit. bloke … patronizing; very helpful to young wr.; think H. James. Not suspect stole only thing ever published from young w. ‘helped.’”

  Now the literary bloke, who was obviously patronizing and might make you think a little of Henry James, was, if anybody on their list, Ralph White. And, regarding White, Sproul had intended to be merciless and outspoken, and against him to make the one accusation which a writer cannot live down.

  Mullins nodded.

  “Suppose he did?” he said. “Steal somebody else’s stuff?”

  Weigand shrugged. It was not the truth of the facts alleged which mattered, for the moment; it was the fact of the allegation.

  “Of course,” he said, “if one of these people killed Sproul to keep him from spilling something, the chances are the something was true. The chances are it was nothing that could be laughed off.”

  Mullins nodded, but his expression was doubtful.

  “Listen, Loot,” he said. “We have a lotta trouble figuring which one he meant. And we got time to work it out. I don’t see why anybody would be scared much, because people listening to lectures wouldn’t connect these Mr. A.’s and Miss B.’s with anybody. Would they?”

  Weigand, listening, nodded. It was a point. However—

  “Don’t forget,” he said, “that Sproul was going to say a lot more than we have here. We don’t know how much more, but maybe enough to identify. And don’t forget that, even if everybody in an audience didn’t get it, there might be somebody, or several somebodies, who would.”

  Weigand, unconsciously pushing the paper aside, began to drum with his fingers on the table. He suggested, talking as much to himself as to Mullins, that they take the case of the man who might be White, “Mr. J.” Here the accusation, the sting in the portrait, was fairly simple. Sproul had intended to charge that White had stolen a manuscript, or at the least a developed idea, from some young writer he had pretended to befriend and published it as his own. Suppose the amplified portrait which Sproul had intended in his lecture had been enough amplified to identify White clearly to people who knew him, or knew of him. Suppose that his own rather pompous picture of himself as an author was all that White had to live on; suppose this fabrication had become all there was to White. And suppose that he became ridiculous and contemptible as a writer who had based all his claims on a theft.

  Such a story would eliminate White as a man of dignity; it would eliminate him as such not only in the eyes of others, but in his own eyes. With such a story spread, White might be expected to disappear like a toy balloon touched by a cigarette end. Suppose White was, as he appeared to be on one interview, acutely egocentric, with the ruthlessness of an egocentric. Did they then have a motive for the murder of Sproul, and a potential murderer who fitted?

  “The way you put it,” Mullins said, “hell, yes.”

  Weigand said he thought so. And they did not know that, with more knowledge, they might not be able to put as good a case against any of the others Sproul had intended to mention. Against Miss B. (and her brother); against Mr. D. and Mr. J. Or against the Mr. K. who came next:

  “Mr. K.… smooth little Nazi ‘hater’; ‘Korean’ and ‘Dutch’ … Innocent small-time journalist. But was? Wonder now—”

  That would be Bandelman Jung; that would clearly hint that Jung was not the hater of fascism he pretended to be, and that his activities in Paris had not been really those of an innocent small-time newspaper correspondent. There would be a strong suggestion, evidently, that Mr. Jung was in fact an agent for fascism. That would interest a good many people, including the F.B.I., and if it proved true.…

  “Well,” Weigand said. Mullins nodded.

  “They don’t get babied, this time,” he said. He thought. “They sure don’t,” he added.

  So there you had another, with perhaps a motive.

  “We’ll have to get onto the Feds about it,” Weigand said. “Maybe we can help each other.”

  “O.K., Loot,” Weigand said. “I’ll give the boys a ring.”

  There were others on the list, Weigand said, who might be interesting, but whose identity was not certain. There was a young woman, for example, who might be Loretta Shaw, which would make her really Mrs. D. But that was guesswork. And it might be possible to tie Loretta in through Schwartz, if it became advisable to tie her in. Or through her direct relationship with Sproul.

  “Maybe,” Mullins said gravely, “she decided she didn’t want to marry him and didn’t like to hurt his feelings by telling him. Thought this w
ay would be kinder, sort of.”

  Weigand smiled and pointed out that it wasn’t, really, preposterous. Things about as unreasonable had happened.

  “You’re telling me,” Mullins told him, finishing his coffee. “How about this Mrs. Williams?”

  Weigand shook his head. Unless her identity was peculiarly well concealed, Mrs. Williams did not appear on the list. Weigand stood up and took Mullins back across the street. There was, on the top of several papers, a memorandum awaiting him. It was timed at a few minutes after he had left for lunch. It read:

  “Mrs. Gerald North called. She says to tell you she is chasing the little dark man. S. K.”

  Sam Knight, on being summoned, said that was all Mrs. North had said. He added that she seemed pretty much steamed up about something.

  9

  Friday, 1:45 P.M. to 3:20 P.M.

  Mrs. North had ordered ice cream and hot chocolate sauce because he hadn’t eaten any bread and she was just lifting the first spoonful toward her lips when she saw the little dark man. He was by the door, waiting at the check stand for his hat and coat, and he was so calm and unhurried that for a moment Mrs. North could not believe her eyes. But she decided she could believe her eyes, because he was certainly little and dark, and also he was certainly the man who had been sitting next to Mrs. Williams at the bar, and talking to her without seeming to.

  Mrs. North put her spoon down and put her hand out quickly to Beth’s wrist and, lifting her hand to point, said, “Look.”

  Beth looked.

  “Oh,” Beth said. “Oh!”

  “Is it?” Mrs. North said.

  Beth nodded violently and looked at Margie, who had also followed Mrs. North’s directions. Margie nodded violently.

  “Oh!” said Beth, with indignation. “It’s the one, Aunt Pam.”