17-Murder Roundabout

by Lockridge, Richard

  There you were, not I, Forniss thought. He said, “Must have been, Mr. Drake. You and Mrs. Weaver not on good terms?”

  “No terms at all.” He smiled faintly. The thin lips seemed unfamiliar with the shape. “Mother took a dim view of Annette,” he said. “Did from the first. Thought I’d been rather an ass to marry her. Quite right about that, probably. Annette was a very beautiful woman, sergeant. I was much younger, of course. And—call it a bit over the traces. Happens, you know.”

  “Sure,” Forniss said.

  “So,” Drake said, “I’ve no idea what she may have been up to for a good many years. Married Jim Brennan. And then this man Weaver. Now and then she’d show up on the TV screen making a—” He changed the sentence. “Extolling some cosmetic or other,” he said.

  “However,” Forniss said, “you did go to a picnic the Weavers gave. Fourth of July, wasn’t it?”

  “Mother wanted to. Curiosity, I suppose. So—yes, we all went to the party, sergeant.”

  “And heard Mrs. Weaver’s speech?”

  “Part of it. Left when I caught the drift. And realized she was a little drunk. Surprised at that, rather. Very moderate drinker when—when we were together. Unusually moderate for the crowd she went around with. A little wine was about all. Oh, champagne, of course. Way she was brought up, I suppose.”

  “Brought up?”

  Drake raised his eyebrows and Forniss shook his head.

  “Supposed you knew,” Drake said. “Born in Austria, I think it was. Parents came to this country when she was in her teens. She won some sort of a beauty contest and got a Hollywood offer.”

  “Her parents still alive?”

  Drake shrugged his shoulders. Then he said he had never met Annette’s parents. “Not a close-knit family,” he said, and then, unexpectedly, to Forniss, “She didn’t go in much for closeknitting.” He thought his former wife’s parents, if they were still alive, lived in New York. Asked, he did not remember where; was not sure he had ever known.

  “Ought to be notified,” Forniss said. “Happen to know the father’s, Mr. LeBaron’s, first name, Mr. Drake?”

  Drake smiled again, with the same apparent effort. He said, “LeBaron?” and shook his head. “Name some press agent gave her,” he said. “Or a studio conference gave her. Long German name originally, as I recall it. Knew it once, of course. Don’t now. LeBaron when I married her. Why-ever I married her. I—”

  The intercom on his wide desk buzzed discreetly and Drake said, “Yes, Miss Hopkins?”

  “When you’re free, Mr. Drake,” the intercom said. It was now a dulcet intercom. “Mr. Brennan would like a few minutes. About the Frothering matter, he says to tell you.”

  “Tell him about—” Drake said, and looked at Forniss, who raised heavy shoulders slightly. “Five minutes?” he said, as much to Forniss as to the intercom. Forniss nodded his head. “Five minutes,” Drake told the intercom, without rising inflection.

  “So,” Drake said, “I don’t really know much—anything really—about her recent activities. Or associates. Or her parents. I’d think that nobody anywhere would need to be notified that Annette’s dead. Newspapers—radio—television this evening.”

  “There’s that,” Forniss said, and got up from the deep chair. “Thanks for the time, Mr. Drake.”

  Drake also stood up. He even held out his hand, which was narrow like the rest of him.

  “Sorry I couldn’t help more,” Drake said. “Nothing more I can tell you about her. Oh, she was the only woman I’ve ever known who could be illiterate in four languages. Doesn’t help much, does it, sergeant?”

  It did not help at all. Odd remark, and maybe the captain could make something out of it.

  James Brennan was in the firm’s office. There was that, and a fact provided without inquiry.

  Uptown a bit on Madison, the bar in which he was to meet Clem Brothers was. Almost an hour to kill. Forniss walked to Grand Central and killed it in the newsreel theater, which showed no newsreel; which showed men and women skiing, rather frantically, in the Swiss Alps. But it was cool in the theater.

  The bar of The Alibi was cool, too, when Charles Forniss went into it at five-thirty. And Clem Brothers, who hadn’t been sure he could make it by then, was already at a table and already had a drink. He beckoned to Forniss with the hand which held the drink. When Forniss joined him he said, “Don’t look a day older, Charlie,” and Forniss said, “Don’t yourself, Clem,” and neither believed the other. Brothers waggled the drink in his hand and a bar waiter came and said, “Yes sir, Mr. Brothers?” and Brothers looked at Forniss, who said, “Bourbon on the rocks, please.”

  “How’s the policeman’s lot, Charlie?” Brothers said. “When constabulary duty’s to be done?”

  The policeman’s lot was pretty much what it had always been; had been when Clem Brothers was a newspaper reporter and watched policemen at constabulary duty. It was a lot of poking around, hoping that something of importance might be dislodged. Which usually it wasn’t. The waiter put Forniss’s drink on the table and Forniss said, “Thanks.”

  “Sort of,” Brothers said, “like getting a cat out from under a bed. Ever try that, Charlie? Push here and the cat goes there. Still under the bed. Great fun for the cat.”

  Forniss said it sounded like it.

  “Not for the owners,” Brothers said. “Get home late from a party maybe. You and your wife want to go to bed and the cats have got under it. Hands and knees with a broom sort of thing. On account of, if you let them stay and go to bed yourselves they jump on you, purring like crazy.”

  “You don’t have to keep them, Clem,” Forniss said. There was no hurry; the barroom of The Alibi was cool; the drink was good. If Clem Brothers wanted to talk about cats—

  “The hell you don’t,” Brothers said. “Anyhow, the hell Julia and I don’t. Live up in Pelham now, by the way. Got two of them. Siamese. Good kind of cat to have. Hiya, Max. Whatja say, Len?”

  The Alibi’s bar was filling. Max and Len were among the fillers. It was a men’s bar. It was a button-down-collar bar. “And see who salutes,” a man who walked by their table said, and Forniss recognized the tag end of an old saying. “Hiya, Clem,” the man said, and Clem Brothers said, “’Lo, Abe.”

  “All right, Charlie,” Clem Brothers said. “Start poking.” But then he looked at his glass, which was empty, and waved it toward the bar. “Told Julia I’d try for the seven-oh-two,” he said. “Hiya, Mike, old boy? What do you want to know about Ralph Weaver, Charlie? Except did he kill his wife, I suppose.”

  He sobered, then. He said it was a damned shame about Nettie. He said she was a good kid. He said, “I didn’t mean that about Weaver, for God’s sake. Don’t get me wrong, Charlie.”

  His drink came. He looked at his watch.

  “Anything you can tell me,” Forniss said. “And catch this train of yours. How does he make his living, Clem?”

  “Jesus,” Clem Brothers said. “And catch the seven-oh-two? He’s all over the place, Charlie. Flesh peddler. Package producer. Handles TV syndications. Got a string of script writers. Got three offices, for God knows what reason. Spread out all over hell, Weaver is.” He drank half a Scotch and water. “Spread a little thin, the gossip is. That’s what you want, isn’t it? What the gossip is?”

  “Yes,” Forniss said. “A fill-in, Clem.”

  Clem Brothers had put out a few feelers after Forniss telephoned. Little that was specific had been felt. It had, Brothers said, been a little like poking through a fog.

  “Five years or so ago,” Brothers said, “Weaver was big. Here. In Hollywood. Ralph Weaver Associates. Ralph Weaver Enterprises. Weaver and Goldsmith, Inc. Handled movie rights, mostly. Did some play agenting. The Weaver and Goldsmith office, that is. Goldsmith’s dead. Wouldn’t be interested in that, Charlie. Natural causes. Hiya, Felix.”

  “Big five years ago, you say. Not now?”

  “Where the fog sets in,” Brothers said. “The feeling is, no. Nobody’s very
clear about it. Or’s saying if he is. Couple of years ago Weaver put a lot into a pilot film and it flopped. Tried to sell it to one of our clients. No soap. Client is soap, ’s’matter of fact. But not for Weaver’s opera.” He drank again, not so rapidly. “You can sink one hell of a lot of dough in a pilot film,” he said. “Maybe Weaver sank too much. This I do—any of this off the record, Charlie?”

  “No. You know it isn’t.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, I mean? No attribution of source?”

  “Unless we have to. I don’t see why we should.”

  “All right. One thing I heard. A while back he picked up the syndication rights to a domestic comedy half hour which had been canceled out. Know about syndication, Charlie?”

  Forniss shook his head.

  “Say a show’s network,” Clem Brothers said. “Say it’s canceled out. Sponsor doesn’t pick up the option. So—depends on how long it’s been on the air. A lot of films or tapes still around. Been aired maybe a couple of times on networks. But there are a lot of independent stations around the country which haven’t run the show. Maybe somebody’s got a hundred films to lease. Leases thirteen to this station and maybe twenty-six to this one and the stations sell the commercial spots to local sponsors. Can be a lot of money in that and it can hang on a long time, with luck. Like residuals.”

  He looked at his glass, which was empty; at Forniss’s, which had a quarter of an inch of fluid in the bottom. He said, “What do you say, Charlie?” and this time it was Charles Forniss who signaled to the waiter, circling the two glasses with his fingers in the air.

  “Weaver had the syndicate rights to maybe three or four shows,” Brothers said, while they waited for the drinks. “This one I heard about was based on a book. Characters came from the book, anyway. So the author of the book had a cut coming. Maybe—oh, ten per cent of the gross, at a guess. Wouldn’t turn out to be of the gross, actually, by the time Weaver tacked a lot of things on—new prints, distribution costs, God knows what all. Legitimate, most of them. In the fine print usually, but legit. Some money in it, all the same, for the author. Maybe—oh, five or six thousand a year. At a guess.”

  The drinks came. Brothers said, “Cheers” and Forniss said, “Looking at you.”

  “This show did all right in syndication,” Clem Brothers said. “Sure, tapered off after the first round, but did all right. Weaver came through with statements for this friend—” He said, “Whoops,” and drank. “This book author,” he said. “Twice a year, as stipulated. First of last year, statement as usual. Around two thousand, the statement said. Only—no check, Charlie. And another statement as of July, and still no check. Annoying for the author, who could use the money.”

  Forniss agreed it might well be.

  “So he’s suing Weaver,” Brothers said. “Municipal court and it’ll take damn near forever. In the end, sure, he’ll get the money. Open-and-shut violation of contract. That is—he’ll get it if Weaver’s got it. Otherwise—well, could be he’d push Weaver Associates, Inc., into bankruptcy. And maybe Weaver Enterprises, Inc., and Weaver and Goldsmith, also Inc.”

  “Weaver hasn’t got the money? Or just don’t want to pay it?”

  Forniss could take his choice. Brothers didn’t know.

  “He looks solvent enough,” Forniss said. “Drives a big Cadillac.”

  “And gets around,” Brothers said. “Most of the popular spots, from what I hear. Places I don’t get to. Staid suburbanite now, Charlie. With a damned attractive wife and a couple of antic cats.”

  “Weaver?” Forniss said. “Take his wife to these places?”

  “You do want gossip,” Clem Brothers told him. “No, mostly not. From what I hear, Cynnie Williams, recently. Cynthia Williams. Client of his. Been in a couple of pretty good movies. And some TV shows. Did a bit part off Broadway that the reviewers liked. A looker. And, at a guess, not much more than twenty. Hell, Charlie, it’s been in the columns.”

  “Don’t read them much,” Forniss said. “Speaking of clients. His wife was one of his, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. That I do know. Sold her to a client of ours, Weaver did. How to look like Annette LeBaron by using Zilch’s medicated soap. Look, I told Julia—”

  “If that’s all you’ve got, Clem,” Forniss said.

  Brothers nodded his head. He said he’d keep the feelers out.

  “Sure, Clem,” Forniss said. “Go catch your train.”

  Clem Brothers looked doubtfully at his newly-emptied glass.

  “On me,” Forniss said, and hoped it wasn’t, but on the State of New York.

  Forniss sat with his own drink and watched the buttoneddown of Madison Avenue and environs trickle out of The Alibi. To go home by train to the suburbs, Forniss thought. To wives they might love as he thought Clem Brothers loved his Julia, or might not be addicted to at all as, perhaps, Ralph Weaver had not been addicted to his Annette.

  Forniss finished his drink and paid for five drinks and took a cab, which the State of New York probably wouldn’t pay for, to the Hippodrome Garage.

  VII

  Leslie used a potato hook to wrench glad bulbs from dry earth. It was not difficult; the soil around Van Brunt is sandy and the heat of the dry summer had not caked it. As she raked the bulbs from the ground she laid the bulbs and leaf blades in the sun to dry. She laid them very neatly, very carefully. She tried to keep her mind occupied with the neatness of the rows she made, with the bulbs in line and the blades reaching precisely out from them. And none of that had any real connection with drying the blades which still showed green before she cut the bulbs from them and stored the bulbs in the basement. It was something to fill the mind with. Thinking that the glads had been surprisingly good this year, in spite of the drought, was another thing to fill the mind with. The grating of the hook on an occasional stone was a sound to muffle other remembered sounds.

  None of it really worked. Leslie Brennan had not supposed it would work. But the remembered sounds had been louder in an empty house. Hooking glad bulbs out of soil is not an activity which much occupies the mind. That late morning, early afternoon, it was only a little better than nothing. One must put the prongs of the potato hook in a certain place so that they will not pierce and damage the bulbs. It is a little thing to think about.

  It had not proved to be enough. She could still hear the sound of a car’s suddenly rasping motor. She could still hear a voice on the telephone and still an almost familiarity in the voice tantalized and remained elusive. It was like a name half remembered, flickering just beyond reach.

  As she worked, in the rear of the garden, a hundred feet or so from the back door of the house, she tried to push out of her mind the memory of the car’s sound. She had been wrong about that. It was essential that she had been wrong. Push that mistake beyond the circle of consciousness. Think about the voice of J. K. Knight on the telephone, summoning her to a meeting which had not taken place. Summoning her to a body lying in blood.

  It did not really matter who J. K. Knight was. He was a voice and a name—a prospect who had not showed up when he had said he would. Obviously he had not. She had waited long beyond the time he had set before she opened the door of the Weaver house. And heard the sound of a motor starting at some distance from the house and fled the house. Closed the door on what the house held?

  She could not remember clearly. She might have left it open, with the hall light glaring down on the dead. If Mr. Knight had come after she had sent the Volks recklessly down the rough driveway he would, almost certainly, have seen the open door and thought it left open for him. He would have found the body and would have called the police. So he had not come at all the night before.

  Make a pattern logical in the mind, as hands made a pattern, a meaninglessly exact pattern, of uprooted glads. The first two rows had been white. Keep them together. The next two red. Keep the reds separate from the whites. But perhaps next year we will mix colors in a row—whites and reds and yellows. Perhaps we will find new color
s in the bins at the store and add new colors. Or perhaps we will throw all these bulbs away, come spring, and buy new bulbs. New bulbs produce better than those which are wintered over. They are not really very expensive. Think of varicolored flowers opening next summer on a stalk of gladiolas. Do not search the mind for a memory of a voice.

  But she searched her mind, as she hauled bulbs (which might never be used) out of sandy soil.

  When she heard the voice, when the man had said, “Oh, good afternoon, Mrs. Brennan,” she had been almost certain that the voice was that of someone she knew. I said something which revealed that, Leslie Brennan thought. Something like, “Why, hello, Mr.—” As if I recognized the voice, as I almost did. But then the man said, “My name is Knight, Mrs. Brennan. Understand the Weaver house is one of those on your list?” and she had realized that she had not really recognized the voice.

  But as she continued to talk to J. K. Knight, and to make arrangements for the meeting which had not come off, the man’s voice continued to sound as if it were a voice she should recognize. That had been mildly irritating; had been distracting. As she wrote the name, “J. K. Knight” down on the telephone pad she had pressed harder than she usually would press, as if she were writing a name on her memory as well as on the pad; as if she were making herself accept that this was a stranger named J. K. Knight.

  It was, of course, entirely a coincidence. Voices are not unique. Now and then, perhaps in a restaurant, one hears a voice and is momentarily certain of the identity of the speaker and then, turning to look, sees a stranger. Mr. Knight happens to have a voice which sounds, on the telephone, a little like the voice of someone I know. But do not, of course, know really well, since now I cannot recall who it was he seemed to sound like.

  She started on another row of glads. She thought, I wish I had father’s ear for sounds—all kinds of sounds. In my place, he would have recognized a similarity, if there really was one, and been able to sort sounds out in his mind and identify an individual. And would, come to that, have been able to speak in both voices, making clear the differences between them. He would have said, “Hear the difference, Daughter?” and I would have heard it.