Death Takes a Bow

by Frances Lockridge

  She looked helplessly at Mrs. Williams, who was sitting with both hands on the desk. It occurred to Mrs. North that Mrs. Williams had been told to keep both hands on the desk.

  “He came in raving,” Mrs. Williams said. Her voice was less shrill than it had been. “He’s like—like a bad melodrama. He keeps accusing me of preposterous things … of being an agent for the Nazis; of—”

  “You will be quiet,” Jung said. As he said it he struck, snake-like, with his free hand. His open hand struck Mrs. Williams across the mouth. After a second, blood trickled slowly from her mouth. She put a hand up to it and brought the hand away again and looked at the blood on it with surprised eyes.

  “No!” Mrs. North said. “You can’t—you—”

  “She is a fool,” Jung said. “She should keep her mouth shut. Give me your gun.”

  Mrs. North shook her head.

  “I haven’t got a gun,” she said. “Why should I have a gun?”

  “You’re police,” Jung told her. “You have a gun. Give it to me!”

  Mrs. North was still holding the door, but her first swinging rush into the room had carried her a little beyond it, so that now she was holding the knob behind her. Jung came toward her and, involuntarily, she shrank back. As she shrank, the door began to close behind her.

  “I haven’t any gun,” she said. “I haven’t anything to do with the police. I came to see Mrs. Williams. I didn’t know you were here.”

  She spoke rapidly, trying to reassure him; trying by simple words about facts to reassure herself. And as she spoke she continued to shrink back, closing the door as she retreated. Then the door met pressure.

  She was staring at Mr. Jung, advancing with his pistol, and his face was a mirror suddenly, telling her that somebody was behind her. Somebody of whom Mr. Jung was afraid. Mr. Jung was not advancing toward her now. He was retreating, slowly, the gun leveled. The eyes were opaque as before, but the lines around them made them change expression. Mr. Jung was afraid.

  “Drop it!” a voice said behind Mrs. North. It was a fine voice for Mrs. North to hear. She stepped back into the room, pulling the door with her, and let Bill Weigand come in. Weigand had his own automatic drawn and it was pointing at Jung. “Drop it!” Weigand commanded. “Get it, Mullins!”

  Mullins was behind Weigand. No, Mullins was beside Weigand.

  “No!” Jung said. The word was like a scream. “No! You never get me. Schwein!”

  The last was sibilant, like a whip in the air.

  The gun in Jung’s hand went up to Jung’s head.

  “You never get me!” he said, again. Pam North, frozen against the partly opened door, waited for the horrible thing to happen.

  But the moment hung. It was too long; somewhere the timing had gone wrong. Jung stood with the pistol against his head and stared at Weigand and Mullins, and the moment hung. And then Weigand spoke and his voice sounded tired.

  “Oh, get it, Mullins,” he said.

  Mullins was in front of Weigand now, although skirting the line of fire between Weigand’s gun and the little dark man. He moved across toward the little man, and he was in no hurry, and he spoke without excitement.

  “O.K., little man,” Mullins said. “Give it to papa.”

  Mullins held out his hand for it, and the little man stared at him. And then, under the dark skin, there was a slowly increasing redness.

  “For heaven’s sake!” Mrs. North thought to herself. “He’s blushing!”

  And then she heard the words and realized that she had spoken aloud again, and the little man’s opaque eyes turned to her with a kind of horrible embarrassment. And then he lowered the gun from his head and held it out to Mullins. And as Mullins took it, the little dark man did the strangest thing of all. He began to cry.

  “Oh,” Weigand said, “for God’s sake!”

  He looked at Pam North, and she could see contempt and pity in his eyes.

  “All right, Mullins,” Weigand said. “Take him along. Get him out of here.”

  “Come along, guy,” Mullins said. “Come with papa.”

  The little man was even smaller than he had been, with the large Mullins beside him, with a large Mullins hand closed on his thin arm. He was disproportionately small. As he and Mullins went out she turned to watch him, and then turned back to Weigand.

  “He seems so little,” she said. “And helpless, somehow. To have done all that. Why did he?”

  “He’s an agent,” Mrs. Williams said. “A spy. He must have killed Sproul because—oh, of something Sproul knew about spies in this country. Or something Sproul did in France. They must have had Jung follow him here. You heard what he said.”

  This last was to Mrs. North.

  “Yes,” Mrs. North said. “He could kill people if he was told to. That fits in. Was it that way?”

  This last was to Weigand. He nodded.

  “He was a spy,” Weigand said. “A little spy, doing little odd jobs. It was—oh, half make-believe and half real. The people he helped are real enough—and dangerous enough, and they used him. For little things. But he made himself believe they were important; he—well, dramatized himself. He was—call him a borderline spy. And probably a borderline case, in addition. But part of it was real. But it wasn’t real enough, finally, to make him kill himself. And then he realized, I guess, that the dangerous, desperate man he thought he was, was mostly make-believe. And so he was upset and embarrassed.”

  Weigand seemed to Pam North to be talking to fill in time. And not everything that he was saying made sense.

  “But killing Sproul wasn’t a little thing,” she said. “And it wasn’t a make-believe thing.”

  Weigand shook his head, slowly.

  “No,” he said. “Murder isn’t a little thing. I suppose it was getting mixed up in murder that finally frightened Jung, and brought him here and made him talk wildly.” He smiled suddenly at Pam. “Mullins and I were outside quite a while,” he said. “Listening.” He paused again, and took up the thread. “He was like a boy playing Indian,” he said. “Like a boy who suddenly discovers that one of the other Indians is really dead. That it isn’t a game.”

  “You’re generous,” Mrs. Williams said, suddenly. She said it with a faint contempt in her voice. “You make a good many allowances—for murder. And murderers.”

  Weigand looked at her and shook his head.

  “No, Mrs. Williams,” he said. “I don’t make many allowances for murderers. I can’t, you know. Even if I appreciate their motives—understand a little of how they must have felt—I can’t make allowances. Not and stay a policeman.”

  There was something puzzling in the way he said it; about the tone of his voice. Mrs. North looked at him oddly and with a half-familiar, unhappy feeling. It was as if pain which had seemed to be aver had returned. Weigand was looking at Mrs. Williams still.

  “But of course,” he said, “Jung wasn’t a murderer, Mrs. Williams. We both know that, don’t we?”

  There was a peculiar alteration in Mrs. Williams’ expression. She was staring at Weigand.

  “I don’t—” she began.

  “Oh, yes,” Weigand said. His voice sounded tired again. “You know what I mean, Mrs. Williams. Mrs. Sproul.”

  “No,” she said. “No! I didn’t!”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Oh, yes you did, Mrs. Sproul,” he said. “You killed your husband. With provocation, of a sort. And Demming, without provocation. To save your neck. It won’t, Mrs. Sproul.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said. “That isn’t my name. You know that isn’t my name.”

  Then Pam remembered what she had come to ask; remembered that she had been right, after all.

  “Your daughters,” she said. “One of them is named Victoria, isn’t she? The older one, for her father. Victoria Leeds Sproul. And the other one is Daphne, after you. And they call one of them Vee at school, or Vee-dee, but that isn’t a name. And it would be a nickname for Victoria, wouldn’t it? And the nieces th
ought the other one was ‘daffy,’ but she wasn’t. That was her name. Vee-dee really said, ‘my sister Daphne.’ Or maybe she called her ‘Daffy.’ Did she, Mrs.—Mrs. Williams?”

  “He wanted—,” Mrs. Williams began. Then she seemed to stiffen. “That is all lies,” she said. “You’re both as mad as little Mr. Jung. I didn’t kill anybody.”

  Weigand shook his head. He said he thought she had.

  “Jung stole the glass Sproul drank out of,” he told her. “Out of the speakers’ room. When Mr. North chased him. Probably he found it had your fingerprints on it. He knew men who would be able to bring the prints up and compare them with yours, if he had yours. And he could get them. So he knew you did it. But he was wrong, of course, about the reason.”

  “He was wrong about everything,” Mrs. Williams told him. “You’re wrong about everything.”

  Weigand appeared not to hear her.

  “It was part of his romantic notion about spying,” he said. “He had set himself to watch Sproul; perhaps he was told to watch Sproul; perhaps Sproul had, when he was in Paris, learned things the Nazis didn’t want him to know. The men Jung was working for might have told him to keep an eye on Sproul—follow him, learn if he planned to give any information to the authorities. So Jung was watching him. Then Sproul died. And that was a surprise to Mr. Jung—a great surprise. Because, you see, he probably thought that the men he was working for, the men from the Axis, had had Sproul killed. Without telling Mr. Jung. And that worried him, naturally; it was by way of being a slap in the face. So he—well, he began to do a little detecting on his own to find out what went on. He stole Sproul’s notes and then—”

  Weigand broke off. It occurred to him that there was no use telling everything.

  “Then he did other things,” he continued. “By way of investigating. Including getting the glass Sproul had drunk from. Which led him to you, Mrs. Sproul.”

  “Don’t call me that!” she commanded. But the command was, in some fashion, also a plea. “Don’t call me that.”

  “And so,” Weigand said, “he assumed you were an agent too, and had been the one instructed to kill Sproul. And he wanted you to know that he had been underestimated, that he couldn’t merely be brushed aside. That he could find things out. And so now he’ll go to the Feds, and to prison. Unless some psychiatrist—”He broke off. “However—” he said.

  “Your real motive was much simpler, of course,” he told Mrs. Williams. “You may as well know what we know. You killed Sproul because he was your husband. He married you a good many years ago in Iowa and—”

  Mrs. North broke in.

  “If I knew she did,” she said, “that was the other discrepancy. Besides her being out with this other man. When—when the poison began to work on Sproul she said to Jerry, ‘Is he sick?’ But if she’d really been what she pretended to be, she would have said, ‘Is he ill?’ Because she came from the east, if she was really who she said she was.”

  “I think,” Weigand said, “that you build a good deal on very little, Pam. But you get to the right place. And it was quick of you—about the girls, I mean. Vee-dee and Daphne.”

  Mrs. Williams said nothing. She stared at them.

  “He married you in Iowa,” Weigand said, returning. “After a couple of years, and two daughters, he left you. Later you came east—looking for him, perhaps?—and when you didn’t find him you—well, decided to burn bridges. To start all over. Even with a new name. As a widow. You were still very young. You—what? Went to night school for law?”

  “That’s true,” Mrs. Williams said. “Anyway, that’s true. And kept the girls alive by working as a waitress. After—after my husband died. After Mr. Williams died.”

  Weigand shook his head, almost gently. But he did not answer otherwise.

  “And finally,” he said, “Sproul came back. A few months ago. And then he was going to divorce you. He talked to people about it, without even using your name. He was saving that—it was like him. Until he sued in New York, where there’s only one cause. I take it he could have proved his case, Mrs. Sproul? That you had—men friends. That his detectives could have got evidence?”

  She did not answer.

  “That was Mrs. North’s other discrepancy,” he pointed out. “You weren’t as—as unrelaxing as you appeared, Mrs. Sproul. And your husband discovered it, and told you he was going to divorce you. For cause, in New York State. And if he could prove his case, he would be awarded custody of the children. That was really it, wasn’t it? That was the motive I mean that was—understandable. He was going to take the children. Not because he wanted them, particularly. But to hurt you. He was a malicious man, everybody said. A very malicious man. And, of course, he wanted to marry again.”

  “You can’t prove any of this,” Mrs. Williams said. “It isn’t true—and you can’t prove it.”

  Weigand said he thought they could. Given time. They could, for example, prove things about Mr. Demming. Probably they could prove that he knew of the marriage, which must have been kept secret, or fairly secret; probably they would find out that he knew her identity as Mrs. Sproul. They would find out, when they looked—now that they knew what to look for, and where to look—that in the old days Demming had been in young Sproul’s confidence, and had remained in his confidence.

  So, although probably they would never need to, they might be able to prove that Demming had read of Sproul’s murder, seen Mrs. Williams’ name mentioned in connection with it, and become suspicious because she did not disclose her real identity. It was, he must have thought, something that the police ought to know. So he wrote the police a letter which, because of a rain-storm, they received too late, and took a train for New York.

  “But he telegraphed you too,” Weigand told Mrs. Williams. “He wanted to give you a chance to explain. He was going to you, to see if you could explain, before he went to the police. Because he knew about your life, and was sympathetic. So you met the train he was coming on, got on it at Newark, smothered Sproul’s old friend—and your old friend, Mrs. Sproul?—and felt safe again. You told your secretary, as you told me, that the telegram was from an out of town client making an appointment. And such a client had made such an appointment, which bore out your story. But he had made it earlier.”

  Weigand paused.

  “We’ll prove those things, Mrs. Sproul,” he told her after a moment. “When we get around to them. We’ll prove that you had motive for killing Sproul, that you had the opportunity to put something in his drink in the speakers’ room, probably that you knew his peculiar susceptibility to morphine. And we’ll let little Mr. Jung tell us about the glass. If—”

  “There!” Pam said. “On the floor! He was showing it to her and dropped it and her prints will still be on the pieces and—”

  She did not finish. Because Mrs. Williams was no longer contemptuous, inflexible in her protestations of innocence. She had whirled her chair and was out of it, and her right foot was raised to stamp on the shards of broken glass on the floor. But Weigand was quicker than she, and before her foot fell he pushed her back, and then he stood over her and looked down at her, and his face was without triumph.

  “You should have stopped with your husband, Mrs. Sproul,” he told her. “People would have been—sorry for you. Seen your side. You should have stopped then, you know. If you had stopped then, it might have been second degree. You shouldn’t have killed Demming, Mrs. Sproul. The jury isn’t going to like your having killed Demming.”

  He looked down at her for a moment.

  “I don’t like it myself, Mrs. Sproul,” he told her. “He was sick, you know. And weak—and sort of old. And he was trying to give you a chance.”

  She said nothing more, and she went with Weigand in a kind of daze.

  16

  Saturday, 5:30 P.M. and Later

  The Norths sat side by side at Charles’ bar and Bill Weigand came in and they moved so that he could sit between them. The Norths looked around for Mullins, and Weigand,
who looked tired, smiled and shook his head.

  “He’s gone to Newark to get something he forgot,” Weigand told them. “Where are the nieces?”

  “At home,” Mrs. North said. “It turned out they are supposed to study and they’re studying. I think. I’ve told Jerry.”

  “About the murder,” Jerry amplified. “About Vee-dee and Daffy and the use of ‘sick.’” He paused, doubtfully. “Which,” he added, “I still think anybody might have used.”

  “Well,” Mrs. North said, “it worked. I knew. And, of course, there was the discrepancy about the man in the restaurant and the way Mrs. Williams was looking at him. That worked, too. But the little dark man did throw me off for a while.”

  Weigand agreed that the little dark man had been a nuisance. Thinking how much of a nuisance, Weigand rubbed his head thoughtfully. There was still a faint bump. It made him think of Dorian, who also had a faint bump, and he said that Dorian was coming along presently, and why didn’t they all have dinner?

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Martha can feed the nieces.”

  There was a little pause while glasses were filled. Then Jerry North said that it was all all right, of course, but that he still didn’t fully get it. What happened, yes. He got that. But how Weigand knew, that he didn’t get. Granting the discrepancies—even granting the girls and their names. Mr. North looked at Weigand darkly and said it still wasn’t enough.

  “It sounds to me like intuition,” he said. He said it with disapproval. Bill Weigand shook his head. He said that the pattern was obvious. Once the outline came clear, it was easy to fill in.

  “The Iowa pattern,” Weigand said. “And the divorce pattern. Sproul was not supposed to be married; he was married and he was getting a divorce. In New York. Nobody had heard of his having been married in the east; it was a good guess that he was married in the Middle West before he came east. Demming knew something; Demming’s connection was that he came from Iowa. Hence—he knew something which had its origin in Iowa. The person who killed him, however, lived here, which indicated that one of the group here had his origin in Iowa, and that what he—or she—wanted to keep secret had happened there. Hence, it had happened a long time—a pretty long time—ago. So then—”