by Frances
“Oh yes,” Mrs. North said. “I’d think so. Wouldn’t you, Mr. Pierson?”
Mr. Pierson looked at her a little darkly, but perhaps only because he was a dark man. And handsome, if you liked dark men—very dark men—Mrs. North decided.
“I’d think a great deal more than the lieutenant would find interesting,” he said. “But I don’t know the lieutenant.”
“Weigand,” Pam explained, wide-eyed. “William Weigand. He’s very nice. But curious, sort of.”
Pierson stood up.
“For example,” Mrs. North went on. “I just thought. He’d wonder, I expect, if you advised Miss Lawrence about her investments and things—whatever you did advise her about, you know—before you became whatever you are here. A partner or something. He’d wonder whether—well, whether you sort of brought her business in when you came, you know. He’s very curious, Bill is.”
Pierson looked at her and she thought his eyes were guarded.
“He must be,” Pierson said, dryly. “Perhaps if he wants to know so much he’d better come around and ask himself.”
Pam North smiled pleasantly.
“Oh,” she said. “I expect he will. He’s very curious about things like that. He thinks so much murder comes from money. And vice versa, of course.”
Mullins and Mrs. North used that as a curtain line, leaving Mr. Pierson looking after them—darkly, but no doubt only because he was such a dark man. When they got out on the street, Mullins said, still blandly, that he was afraid Mrs. North had irritated Mr. Pierson there toward the end. Mullins made a deprecatory sound with his tongue and teeth about that and Mrs. North said she was sorry.
“But I do think the lieutenant will be interested,” she said. “Because I do think that he got his job because he had control of Ann Lawrence’s money and—sort of brought it with him. And that makes you wonder if he’s still got it, doesn’t it?”
“It could,” Mullins said. “It could make you wonder that. I guess the loot will want to have auditors find out, probably.”
Pam nodded.
“And,” she said, “you said something that made me wonder whether there was something between Mr. Pierson and Ann. Something emotional, I mean.”
“Yeah,” Mullins said. “I guess there was something. But he says it wasn’t anything much.” Mullins pondered it. “Of course,” he said, still carrying out the game, “the lieutenant might think he was holding back something. The lieutenant’s apt to be suspicious, sometimes.”
Pam agreed that he was. Particularly, she pointed out, when there was a good deal of money around. Say, she added, that somebody was handling a girl’s estate and some of the estate got lost and that he tried to marry her to make it all right—because he could cover up that way—and she wouldn’t marry him because she was in love with somebody else. And then suppose she found out that some of the estate had got lost and threatened to do something about it and—
“Yeah,” Mullins said. “Suppose all that. Where does the other girl fit in?”
That, Pam told him, was simple. The other girl had worked there—at Estates Incorporated. Working there, she might have found out something. She might have found it out and told Ann. She might have known enough to send Mr. Pierson to jail. Or, maybe, to the electric chair.
“Because,” Pam amplified, waving at a taxicab which continued indifferently on its way, “Frances might have known that he had a motive for killing Ann. Because of the money he stole and the fact that she wouldn’t marry him.”
“Listen, Mrs. North,” Mullins said, waving at a taxicab, which stopped. “We don’t even know he stole any money.”
“Oh,” Pam said, “I think he must have, really. He looks like it. And he didn’t like me at all, and why wouldn’t he if he hadn’t?”
X. Wednesday, 11:10 A.M. to 11:45 A.M.
Bill Weigand contemplated in retrospect the conversation he had just had with the commissioner and tried to fit it in. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley had been present, but more or less formally. Inspector O’Malley had, he made it clear to Weigand and to the commissioner, turned the case over, so far as detail went, to Lieutenant Weigand. O’Malley was still in there thinking, but the lieutenant was doing the spade work. The commissioner, who was wiry and deceptively soft voiced and had been a policeman all his life, accepted this gravely and directed most of his remarks to Lieutenant Weigand.
The commissioner did not, he said, want to interfere or to suggest a line of inquiry. That was up to Weigand. But he did want to hear what Weigand thought of Dan Beck—since Dan Beck had somehow come into it. The commissioner assumed that Weigand had followed his suggestion and looked Beck up.
Fortunately, Weigand had, on his way from his own office to Headquarters, after receiving the commissioner’s telephoned summons. Weigand had done it by the simple method of stopping by a newspaper office and having a look at the morgue, this being usually the easiest way of finding out a little about anything. Among the clips Weigand skimmed had been one rather long one, reviewing Beck’s career in connection with a book which Beck had, recently written—the kind of book which is reported in the news columns as well as in the book reviews. (Mr. Beck’s book had further been a stick to beat the New Deal with, which had helped.)
Since Beck was, if not fully on the right side—he advocated change, after all—still against the wrong side, the report on his career had been reasonably favorable. He had been, which was in his favor, a business man of sorts and no professor. He was the originator of the Beck System of Industrial Management, which had had, a few years earlier, almost the popularity of the Culbertson System of Contract Bridge. Industry had used it widely, workmen had struck almost as widely because of it, it had been tried out in Germany. It measured the output of each worker in a unit rather intricately compounded of time spent, product achieved, price of product to consumer and supply of labor available for the fabrication of the product, together with the amount of capital involved in the making of each item in the total product and a further component which, to Bill Weigand a little mystically, involved the commodity index averaged-over a preceding six-months’ period.
Mr. Beck, or people representing him, had stirred all these elements together in the case of an individual industry which desired to install the Beck System of Industrial Management and given figures applicable, together with a survey showing how the plant could be more efficiently run. The management then paid a fee and happily installed the System. Then, commonly, the workers in the plant walked out growling and modifications set in. The modifications, Weigand gathered, never reached as far as the fee paid to Dan Beck, who was also Dan Beck Systems, Inc., in the United States, Beck, Ltd., in England and Der Beckische Fabrikwerkengesellschaften-system in Germany before Hitler took it over and interned the executives, en masse, as representatives of international Jewish plutocratic bolshevism.
That period in Mr. Beck’s career had reached its height almost ten years before. It had been preceded by a period during which Mr. Beck was by turns an auditor, a stock salesman and, briefly, publisher of something called the Volume of Wisdom which had had a fairly wide sale before it, and Mr. Beck, became mysteriously involved in litigation which appeared to have a charge of plagiarism somewhere at bottom—the newspaper account was politely vague at this point. The litigation had faded out, as had the Volume of Wisdom and, for a year or more, Mr. Beck himself. Then the Beck System had begun in a small way and burgeoned and it had continued to burgeon, in a modified way, even after 1929. But after the spring of 1933, industry, involved in new complexities, apparently had had less time for the complexities of the Beck System, even when lucidly explained by the Beck Representatives, and Mr. Beck himself appeared to have spent several years on the Riviera, during which he entertained several very distinguished personages, one of whom had, while visiting Mr. Beck, undergone a very distinguished theft of jewels. (The jewels had later been recovered in a lock box in the Grand Central Terminal under circumstances rather more mysteri
ous than those surrounding their original theft, which had been accomplished by the use of a ladder leading to a second-story bedroom. Weigand remembered the case, now he had run into it, and was less perplexed than the newspaper was, or chose to be, about the recovery of the jewels. A good many things like that had happened about then, prior to the sudden death of an almost mythological private detective.)
Mr. Beck had returned to the United States unassumingly a few months before the start of the war and it was six months later that he emerged gently from obscurity. He emerged, a little to the surprise of everyone, as a radio commentator, speaking fluently—and very mellifluously—as an expert on Europe, and displaying a command of oratory of which no one had previously suspected him. Miracles of inflation were occurring in those days, and almost before anybody knew it, Mr. Beck had expanded from a single small station to a chain and from a man who could talk entertainingly, and with considerable eloquence, about the European scene into a man who had definite and from the start persuasive theories on the redrawing of the American one. Mr. Beck was now on the largest, most national hookup of them all, speaking Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays just as people were getting up from dinner and weakened by the early labors of digestion. It had proved easier for hundreds of thousands to listen to Mr. Beck than to walk to the radio and turn him off, and by then remote control devices were quietly breaking down throughout the country and were, in face of a new haughtiness on the part of radio technicians, remaining unrepaired. So Mr. Beck thrived.
“There’s more to it than that,” the commissioner had pointed out when Weigand, in rather different word’s, had reviewed Mr. Beck’s career to this point. “The man’s infernally dangerous. He ought—something ought to be done.”
“He ought to be thrown off the air,” Inspector O’Malley said, flatly.
The commissioner shook his head. Nobody ought to be thrown off the air for saying what he thought, and there was no way of proving that Beck wasn’t saying what he thought. No way, indeed, of bringing up that academic point.
“It is hard to put your finger on,” the commissioner said. “There’s no way we can put a finger on it. It’s hard even to say what’s wrong with it, except that the whole picture he paints is false and emotionally—attractive. It’s like the universal old-age pension schemes, although less definite; it’s like Father Coughlin—it’s an invitation to an emotional debauch in the economic field. It’s—well, it could be a Leader coming up again, using American terms, promising things we all dimly remember as good things. It—”
“What it amounts to,” Weigand said, when the commissioner paused and did not continue. “What it amounts to is that you think Beck is organizing a mob. A mob he could lead—almost anywhere. To the destruction of almost anything. An American leader.”
The commissioner nodded slowly and said that probably that was what he did mean. Even now, the commissioner said, he had—well, influence. Enough so that he could call up the commissioner and reach him on the telephone and ask that the man handling the Lawrence case come around, and be justified in confidence—well, say in certainty—that the officer in charge of the Lawrence case would be told to come.
“That’s for this room,” the commissioner said. “I’m not saying it would work—yet—in anything big. It wouldn’t as long as I’m here. But the things in which it will work are getting—well, they’re getting bigger.” He broke off and looked at Weigand. “You saw him last night?” he said, knowing. Weigand had.
Weigand nodded.
“He was very agreeable,” Weigand said. “Very polite—very—folksy. We were just pals together. He alibied Elliot.” Weigand looked at Inspector O’Malley. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” he said. “It’s a pretty good alibi.”
“There’s a hole in it,” the inspector said. “There’s got to be.”
Weigand was polite, as becomes a lieutenant in contradicting an inspector, but he didn’t think so. At least, he saw none.
“You’ve read my report, sir,” he said to the commissioner. “Do you see any?”
“No,” the commissioner said. “I don’t see any. But that’s up to you. I wouldn’t be too easy on it.”
Naturally, Bill Weigand indicated, he was not going to be easy on it.
“Of course,” the commissioner said, “it alibies Beck too, doesn’t it? Now if—”
He let that hang and Weigand was a little surprised. It continued to hang, needing some response.
“There’s nothing to tie Beck in that I can see,” he told the commissioner. “Except that he knew Elliot and Miss Lawrence. There’s no motive. And he alibied Elliot, which he wouldn’t have done, so far as I can see, if he’d been involved himself. At least, I never heard of a murderer alibiing another possible suspect.”
“And himself,” the commissioner reiterated. “It works both ways.”
Tactfully, Weigand corrected that. It was an alibi for Elliot, in the sense that it was independent evidence that he was not at the scene, at the time. In the case of Beck, since Elliot had not substantiated the story, it was merely an unsupported denial. Only if Elliot said the same thing would Beck be alibied, in any real sense of a misused term.
“And Elliot ain’t around,” Inspector O’Malley pointed out. “Elliot’s hiding out. How do you figure that, Weigand?”
Weigand admitted he didn’t figure it. Not yet. The commissioner was having his own thoughts. When he spoke it was without inflection.
“Of course,” he said, “there oughtn’t to be any finageling with the law. No subterfuge. Capone should have gone up for murder, not for beating the income tax. But—it would be convenient to find that Mr. Beck had stepped out of line somewhere, in addition to being out of line everywhere. It would be—convenient.”
Weigand contemplated this and he was a little surprised. The commissioner must regard Mr. Beck as a very considerable menace, indeed, if he was willing to suggest, even without inflection, what he seemed to be suggesting.
“A murder rap,” Weigand said, “is a good way out of line, commissioner. It’s a hell of a long way out of line. For convenience.”
The commissioner smiled faintly and advised Bill Weigand not to be too literal.
“I never framed anybody for murder,” he said, still without inflection. “Or had it done—for murder. Or—allowed it to be done, since I’ve been in a position to allow anything. It would be convenient if Mr. Beck were even suspected of murder—publicly. If there are grounds for suspecting him. I don’t say there are.”
Weigand was stubborn and felt himself being stubborn.
“I don’t see any, commissioner,” he said. “Perhaps—perhaps the inspector has somebody available with—better eyes.”
The commissioner looked at Weigand with something like amusement and advised him to be his age. He said that Weigand’s eyes were all right and always had been.
“They’re good enough for the Army, probably,” Weigand said, forcing it. “My kind of the army.”
“Forget it, Lieutenant,” the commissioner said. “They’re good enough where they are—and useful enough. You young cops.”
Weigand thought he was not so young as all that; not by a good bit. He also felt, obscurely, as if he were lacking in tact. The commissioner seemed amused.
“Forget Mr. Beck, Lieutenant,” he said. “No doubt you’re right. It would be—too convenient. Probably the inspector here’s right—probably it is young Mr. Elliot. It usually is.”
The commissioner did not mean, as he seemed to mean, that it was usually young Mr. Elliot. He meant it was usually the man who ran away. The most obvious man. He meant that the inspector, as a man a long time a cop, would usually be right about the man they were looking for.
And probably, Weigand thought, sitting at his desk and making small, meaningless marks on paper, and drumming his fingers on the desk and waiting for the boys to bring in the dope—probably Inspector O’Malley is right this time. Probably it is John Elliot. Because nine times out of ten, ninety-nine
out of a hundred, it is the most obvious man or the most obvious woman. Usually it is so obvious that it hits you between the eyes; usually it is as obvious from the start as it was that Ruth Snyder was lying when she told her pathetic story of being bound by a grotesque intruder who had then killed her husband with a sash-weight. Usually it leaps at you from between the lines of newsprint. Usually, for all their pathetic efforts, murderers are as obvious as their crimes.
So still Elliot was the man to start with—his was the name to write at the top of the list. Elliot, Martinelli—thereafter your list began to run out. Add Cleo Harper, in consideration of oddities noted by Mrs. North, who had an eye—as well as a tongue—for oddities. By the same frail token, add Mrs. Florence Pennock, who was also odd. Add Dan Beck, because it would be convenient—and because he had put in an appearance, even if the nature of the appearance seemed to vouch for its innocence. Put Beck in, in other words, because the commissioner evidently liked the idea, hoping against hope; because the commissioner was a policeman and hated, almost by instinct, mobs and the leaders of mobs—hated and feared them.
It wasn’t, Weigand thought, much of a list. He crumpled it into the waste-basket, which seemed, this time, to be getting more than its share of useless notation.
Weigand looked at what else the boys had brought in. They had brought in two women and a man who had been at Ann Lawrence’s house before she was killed and none of their names meant anything and none of their stories meant anything. They had, in two cases, eaten dinner at Ann’s and stayed the evening; the man had come later and stayed the evening. They had been friends of Ann and were shocked at her death; they had noticed nothing unusual during the evening. They were supernumeraries—or quicker-witted than the detectives who had questioned them.
Weigand leaned back in his chair and thought of Ann Lawrence’s last party. He thought of the small house on the park, and of the kind of easy elegance which its size and the money spent on it had given it. He thought of cars stopping in front of it and people getting out—young people, for the most part. Probably attractive people. He thought of the door opening and light coming out through it and people moving into the light from the dimmed-out street. He thought of Ann Lawrence, who was young and attractive and had everything before her and friends with her and a dress she liked and a feeling of being rested and a little excited. He thought of her waiting that final fifteen minutes between the time she was ready for the first of her guests and the time the doorbell first rang and perhaps using it to straighten a flower or to move some small object on a table. (Dorian did that, and even when it was not a special party she was a little happy and excited, and she would go out into the kitchen to see if the canapés were attractive and attractively arranged.)
