Death Takes a Bow

by Frances Lockridge

  “Am I to take it that you really want to find out?” Schwartz said. It was an effort to get his feet under him, and sounded like it. “Or are you just asking?”

  Weigand said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “All right,” Schwartz said. “Maybe I was wrong. No, I didn’t kill Sproul, Lieutenant. And Retta didn’t. But I worked out some very fancy ways to kill him, from time to time. In my mind. In day dreams.”

  “George!” Loretta Shaw said. “You mustn’t—”

  “Very fancy plans,” Schwartz insisted, but his tone was light and amused. “Sealed rooms and everything. One of them was new.”

  Weigand went along.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “I doubt it, Mr. Schwartz.”

  “So,” Schwartz said, “you read them too. Carter Dickson?”

  “Sometimes,” Weigand said. “Only it’s John Dickson Carr for sealed rooms.” Schwartz shook his head.

  “I don’t see that it makes any difference,” Loretta Shaw said. “I really don’t.”

  Atmospheres changed rapidly with these people, Weigand thought. Now they were both very amiable. Which proved nothing; murderers could be amiable when not a-murdering. None of this proved anything, one way or the other. But while the atmosphere lasted it was worth utilizing. Weigand relaxed and lighted a cigarette and gave the impression of a man who had concluded his business and was about to go, but was in no hurry to go.

  “Right,” he said, and then after a pause, during which Schwartz and the girl looked at him with mild interest, he went on.

  “Frankly,” he said, “and without prejudice—you people puzzle me a little. All of you—you two, Sproul as was, Mr. White and the Akrons. Particularly Mr. White.”

  “Do we?” Loretta said. “Why? And why Mr. White particularly?” She paused, smiled and said: “Not that I can’t see how he might.”

  The three of them shared appreciation of Mr. White, needing no words.

  “Right,” Weigand said, after a moment. “That’s precisely it. Here is Mr. White and he is—well, what he is. Apparently he strikes the two of you much as he strikes me. One of you didn’t like Sproul, the other was going to marry him. There was tension between the two of you about him. Akron doesn’t seem to like anybody—except his sister. Little Mr. Jung—” He broke off and started over. “What I’m trying to say,” he said, “is that you formed a group which wasn’t—well, well assorted. And yet you formed a group. You all, even you, Schwartz, went to a dinner celebrating Sproul’s lecture tour. And all the time I’ve felt that you were—well, sticking together. However you felt about one another. It makes a kind of disunited united front.”

  Weigand invited confidence; I am, he thought, being very lulling. Without prejudice.

  “Not Jung,” Schwartz said. “Definitely not Jung. As for the rest—well, I know what you mean. I’d never thought about it, particularly, but I know what you mean. It’s a hangover from Paris, I suppose.”

  “Yes?” Bill Weigand said, and waited.

  “It’s merely,” Loretta Shaw said, “that we were a little group of roughly one kind of people in a much larger group of another kind of people. Isn’t that it, George? We went around in little circles.”

  “Concentric,” Schwartz said. “Yes, Retta, I suppose so. And when we came back we—well, brought our difference with us. Along with our differences. Our difference from other people, I mean. Although it was imaginary here. I suppose that it is merely that we had shared certain experiences and felt that we knew one another better than we knew other people.” He paused and looked abstractedly past Weigand. “Sometimes it seemed as if only that was real,” he said. “As if afterward we had been only playing out the string. Or it felt that way at first. Now it’s wearing off; we haven’t been as united lately as we used to be. After this I suppose we won’t be united at all. But I can imagine how we would seem to an outsider.” He smiled, and looked at Weigand. “My use of that word explains the whole business,” he said. “Doesn’t it? It even includes Mr. White, who’s certainly a funny guy if there ever was one.”

  “Very funny,” Weigand agreed. “Do you suppose he would steal somebody else’s work and pass it off as his own?”

  There was a pause. You can hear the brick drop, Weigand thought. Schwartz and Loretta Shaw looked at each other and then at Weigand. She left it to Schwartz, who said he wouldn’t know.

  “But there was a story to that effect?” Weigand said. It was not really a question.

  “There were a lot of stories,” Schwartz said. “About everybody. Our friend Mr. Sproul was a great spreader of stories. I may have heard one about White. I wouldn’t know whether it was true. He may have heard stories about me. He wouldn’t know whether they were true, or what the truth about them was.”

  He stared at Weigand. The atmosphere was changing again. But the interlude had been useful; maybe it had been useful. Weigand twisted out his cigarette.

  “I got the story from Sproul’s notes,” Weigand told them. “I got several stories.” He let it lie, for what they wanted to make of it. He took up another tack.

  “How long were you planning to marry Sproul, Miss Shaw?” he wanted to know. “How long were you engaged to him?”

  The girl thought a moment and said about a year, more or less. Weigand registered surprise.

  “Wasn’t that a good while?” he asked. “I mean—I should have expected you to marry as soon as you thought it would be a good idea. Being sensible people.”

  And, he did not add, informal people. He thought of Mullins’ description of the group and did not let his face show what he had thought.

  “She really knew better,” Schwartz said. “When it looked like coming to the point, she had more sense.”

  His tone was resolute; more resolute than convincing. Loretta Shaw shook her head slowly.

  “No,” she said. “Not honestly. In the last few months, yes. But there was a while before that when I would have married him any time. Only he wasn’t in any hurry.” She looked at Schwartz. “That’s how it was, George,” she said. “I’m glad now, but that’s how it was. He kept putting it off. I didn’t.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “I have to be personal, you know. I may as well go on. Did Jean Akron have anything to do with it? His hesitancy, I mean?”

  The girl flushed. But she looked at Weigand, and her voice was calm.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “I think so now, anyway. I didn’t then. I thought—oh, that there were some arrangements he had to make first. But perhaps it was Jean.”

  Weigand nodded. He said Jean’s brother seemed to think so. He added that they were devoted, for brother and sister.

  “He is,” Schwartz said. “I don’t know about Jean. Lately. I think she’s—well, been noticing Y. Charley a good deal.”

  “This devotion—?” Weigand said.

  Schwartz shook his head.

  “She keeps house for him,” he said. “She’s useful to Herbert Akron, and Herbert Akron is very devoted to people who make him comfortable. He doesn’t want things upset. He can be pretty violent about it, because he’s a pretty violent guy, apparently. We never knew him very well; he dropped in and out, seeing his sister, coming on business mostly. He wasn’t one of the group. Neither was Y. Charley, for that matter. But a lot of people you haven’t heard of were.”

  Loretta Shaw picked it up. She said there was no reason why it should be somebody from the group, or that part of the group Weigand knew.

  “A lot of other people didn’t like Lee,” she said. “A lot of them may be in New York.”

  Weigand nodded and said, “Right.” He added that they would broaden it out later, if they had to; that it was early days yet.

  “We merely take people up as they come along,” he said. “Without prejudice.”

  He stood up.

  “We’re still suspects, I suppose?” Loretta Shaw said, her voice carefully light.

  “Oh, yes,” Weigand said. “Maybe one of you did it. Maybe you, so you
wouldn’t have to marry Sproul. Or for some other reason. Maybe you, Schwartz. So she couldn’t marry him. Or for some other reason.”

  “Naturally,” Schwartz said, and his tone matched Weigand’s. “Naturally we deny it.”

  “Naturally,” Weigand said. “Why not?”

  He started toward the door and the telephone bell rang. He hesitated and Loretta Shaw answered it. She said, “Why, yes, he is,” and turned to Weigand. “It’s for you,” she said. Weigand took the telephone and listened and said, “Right.” He looked at the two a moment, speculatively.

  “I’ll probably be back,” he said, in a different voice. He went out and down the stairs and into the Buick. He went downtown fast.

  Weigand read the letter again. It was written on the stationery of a Pittsburgh hotel, in long hand, and the signature was legible enough. It was addressed to “Officer in Charge, Homicide Bureau, Police Headquarters, New York City.” It read:

  Dear Sir:

  I believe I have information which may help you solve the murder of Mr. Victor Leeds Sproul. Since before giving you that information, I must conduct certain investigations of my own, I am leaving for New York tonight on the 11:15 train. I will come to your office some time during the morning and I would appreciate an interview with the officer in charge of the Sproul investigation.”

  The writer was “sincerely yours.” He was Robert J. Demming. And he was dead, per the report of Detective Lieutenant Fahey. Weigand looked at the envelope, clipped to the letter. He was dead because it had rained heavily the day before; so heavily that airplanes between Pittsburgh and New York were grounded; so heavily that a letter marked for air-mail had come through by train. And as a result neither air-mail postage nor special delivery stamp had got the letter to men who would have known what to do about it until Mr. Demming was dead.

  If the letter had come by air-mail it would have reached him the evening before, Weigand thought. And if it had reached him the evening before, Mr. Demming would not have been left to his own resources. They might have thought that Mr. Demming was probably a crank; they would have thought that Mr. Demming was probably a crank. But a crank who brings his crankiness personally from Pittsburgh to New York is not a crank to be ignored by policemen very anxious for information. As God knows we are, Weigand thought, with annoyance. So Mr. Demming would have been met and safeguarded.

  And that, Weigand thought immediately, would have done them no particular good, because Mr. Demming would have been dead by the time they had met him. Unless they had gone to North Philadelphia, where they would not have gone. Or—wait a moment—to Newark. They would not have gone there either. But—

  “Yeh,” Lieutenant Fahey said, as Weigand looked up at him. “A hell of a note, ain’t it?”

  Weigand agreed. He asked Fahey a question. Fahey shrugged.

  “That’s what they say,” he told Weigand. “They’re pretty positive. Whoever killed him must have ridden with him from at least North Philadelphia. Sure the train stops at Newark. And sure nobody could have got on there. That’s what they say.”

  He shrugged slightly.

  Weigand tossed him a sheaf of reports and shrugged in turn. Fahey leafed through them and said it was sure a hell of a note.

  The reports were from watching men who had had eyes on certain people until six o’clock that morning, when their tours of duty ended. They had not been replaced, because Inspector O’Malley had decided it wasn’t necessary; because, Weigand admitted honestly, he had himself been fairly sure it wasn’t necessary, and had made no argument. The reports showed that at six o’clock that morning, barring devious exits from their apartments and furnished rooms, and homes in Westchester, the people being watched had been under observation in New York City. They had not been in North Philadelphia. At 6:40 the train on which Robert J. Demming was riding, bringing information to the police, left North Philadelphia for New York. At that time Mr. Demming was alive.

  If the murderer of Mr. Demming got on the train at North Philadelphia, he was not George Schwartz, at home in his hotel in the Forties, or Loretta Shaw, at home in Murray Hill; it was not either of the Akrons, nor Mr. White nor Y. Charles Burden. It was not Mrs. Paul Williams nor, on the basis of another report, this time from an F.B.I. man, the little dark Mr. Jung. It was, in short, not anybody who had so far entered the sprawling, unsatisfactory picture of the Sproul investigation. And if that was true, Weigand had so far got precisely nowhere, which was discouraging.

  But if it were Newark, now—there had been time enough to get to Newark by tube train and to meet the train which was bringing Mr. Demming. A murderer would have had to move briskly, but murderers must expect to make some sacrifices.

  Weigand called Mullins and gave Mullins instructions. Mullins looked grieved and said, “Newark?” in a certain tone. When Weigand nodded, Mullins said, “O.K., Loot, but how about using a department car?”

  “So long as it isn’t connected with you, O.K.,” Weigand said. “But remember, you’re not a cop. You don’t show any badge. Remember, you may have to testify, eventually.”

  “Yeah,” Mullins said. “If you can get it in. Which you can’t.”

  That, Weigand told him, they would let the D.A.’s office worry about. When and if. The D.A.’s office could tell it to the judge. At the least, they would have the information.

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. Mullins departed.

  Mullins consulted time-tables and ordered a car from the police garage. He drove discreetly through the Holland Tunnel and followed signs to the Pulaski Skyway. He followed a sign which said “Newark Business District” and dropped down an incline from the elevated highway into the turmoil of New Jersey traffic. In Newark he had time to find a parking lot and deposit the car, and afterward to walk a block to the Pennsylvania Station. Mullins bought a Hudson and Manhattan ticket to New York and noted the cost down in the notebook which was sacred to the expense account.

  Mullins climbed stairs to the platform. A multiple-unit train waited, with doors open and a few passengers sitting disconsolately inside, to the right of the platform as he faced in what was, he decided, the direction of New York. Mullins sauntered along the platform, lighting a cigarette; looking, he trusted, like a passenger stretching his legs until the last minute. He paused by the open door of one of the cars and gazed in abstractedly. (And a small, furtive man, who knew the build of the Mullinses through long, and rather unsatisfactory, experience, arose with an air of great preoccupation, kept his face averted, and sauntered back through two cars. Reaching the third, he sauntered out, stood for a moment abstractedly on the platform and, being sure Mullins was looking the other way, darted down a flight of exit stairs. The small furtive man didn’t know whether they were after him again, but usually they were. Mullins, pleasantly assuring himself that nobody would take him for a policeman, continued his ambling patrol of the platform.)

  Red caps appeared on the platform and began to look up the line. The head end of an electric locomotive appeared, and pulled a string of cars slowly along the platform, on the left as Mullins faced New York. Doors began to open and porters in white coats peered out. Red caps ran with the train along the platform, having picked their doors. The train stopped and porters began shoveling bags to the platform. Mullins loitered near one of the doors, well back in the train and in the Pullman section.

  There was only a little luggage to come out of the car he had picked, and red caps clustered around it hopefully. Several people came out, pointed at bags and went off with porters following them. At the doors of the Hudson and Manhattan cars, trainmen began to call, “This train for downtown New York. This train for downtown New York.” Mullins moved up half the length of a car, toward the locomotive, and then walked down briskly toward a door. He reached it just as the porter was stepping back inside. Without hesitation, Mullins followed the porter inside. The porter looked at him.

  “So this is Newark, huh?” Mullins said, with heartiness. “Doesn’t look like much, George.”
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  “No, suh,” the porter said, continuing to look at him. Mullins remained bland.

  “You don’t stop long,” Mullins said. “Didn’t have time to get back to my own car.”

  The porter looked at him and quit looking at him.

  “No, suh,” he said. “Jes’ for people to get off. You goin’ to the Pennsylvania Station, suh?”

  “That’s right,” Mullins said. He walked past the Negro, now moving rapidly. He moved forward in the car and was half way along it when the train started. He reached the door ahead and found a porter closing it.

  “Hold it, boy,” Mullins said. “I want to get off!”

  The porter shook his head and said, “Sorry, suh.”

  “Can’t open it now,” the porter said. “We’s started, boss. Guess you’ll jes’ have to go on to New York, boss.”

  Mullins guessed so too. He remembered the police car parked in Newark, realized he would have to go back to Newark and get it, and said, “Damn.”

  “Yes, suh!” the porter said. Mullins, thinking with exasperation about the return trip to Newark, went to the men’s lounge at the end of the car and sat down and lighted a cigarette. Anyhow, it had worked. He wouldn’t, he decided, have to tell the Loot about getting caught on the train and having to go back to Newark for the car. It had worked without too much difficulty, but probably with the maximum difficulty to be expected. With more luck, he might have avoided conversation with the first porter, who might be expected to remember him. But he did not see how, without hopeless bungling, he could have had worse luck, and he was on the train.

  So anybody could have boarded Car 620 in Newark by going to the trouble of pretending that he was a passenger on the train, and got off when the train stopped to stretch his legs, and had boarded it again before it left, entering through any car and pretending that his assigned accommodations were on another car. Anybody could then go to Bedroom C, assuming he knew Mr. Demming to be in Bedroom C, walk in, smother Mr. Demming, walk into the lounge—either lounge, depending on sex—or walk through to another car, get off at New York and go about his business.