Killing the Goose

by Frances

  “No, sir, certainly not,” he said. Magistrate Barrsmith seemed mollified.

  “Well,” he said. “It isn’t. And you’ve wasted enough of its time, counselor. What bail do you suggest?”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” the attorney said.

  Magistrate Barrsmith seemed bored. The reporters seemed bored.

  “So ordered,” Magistrate Barrsmith said. “Let’s get on with it. Next case.”

  The reporters left with the assistant district attorney, Weigand and Mullins, Pierson and Mr. Kendall, Franklin Martinelli. They had not, Magistrate Barrsmith feared—correctly—taken down anything he said. It was lamentably hard to get in the newspapers from a magistrate’s bench, unless you disagreed publicly with Butch. And it was not particularly wise to disagree publicly with Butch.

  Justice slowed down somewhat after the magistrate’s court. The Grand Jury wanted to hear a good deal of testimony, and did. It heard from the auditors, it heard from Martinelli, it heard from the Medical Examiner’s office and from Detective Lieutenant William Weigand and from Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley. It adjourned for lunch and consultation, convened and heard from representatives of Estates Incorporated, from Max Silverstone, who went white again when he told how Mrs. Pennock’s body had fallen on him. The jury also heard of the death of Frances McCalley and of that of John Elliot.

  Built up, with all the issues stated, it made a convincing case, Weigand thought as he listened to the parade of witnesses. If you could get all this before a trial jury—but the trouble was you couldn’t. The Grand Jury had wide latitude; the defense did not answer back. Half, anyway, of what the Grand Jury had heard by four o’clock that afternoon, the trial jury would never be allowed to hear. The State could not even try to give the trial jury so full a picture, since it would state its case on the murder of Ann Lawrence. That had been decided at a brief conference before the Grand Jury hearing began. But the State decided, also, that it would take whatever it could get out of the Grand Jury, so as to have something in reserve.

  At ten minutes after five, the Grand Jury handed up indictments to Judge Washburn in General Sessions charging Alfred Pierson with the crime of murder in the first degree in connection with the deaths of Ann Lawrence, Frances McCalley, Florence Pennock and John Elliot. It also, in a fifth indictment, charged him with grand larceny on three counts in connection with his manipulation of the estate of Ann Lawrence, deceased, and with second degree forgery. (This last legal anticlimax grew out of certain alterations in records which auditors testified had been corollary to the theft of most of Miss Lawrence’s once comforting fortune.)

  Judge Washburn issued bench warrants on each indictment and they were duly served on Alfred Pierson, who was already in the new Tombs. Pierson was immediately taken before Judge Washburn and pleaded not guilty, severally, to all indictments. He was remanded to the Tombs, without bail. The Chief Magistrate signed an order dismissing the charge of homicide against Pierson, in view of the superseding indictment. The State of New York was now, formally, ready to proceed. With luck, it might find a gap in the court calendar in about three weeks.

  There were few things more tiring than the law, Weigand thought as, with Mullins, he ate a nondescript dinner in a nondescript restaurant at a few minutes after seven. Because whatever Magistrate Barrsmith might like to say in public, this had been a day of pure formality. It had been speeded up, in consideration of the public interest in the case. It had been essential; it all had its vital part in the fair administration of justice. Weigand would not have seen—he would have fought as hard as he could against—any shortcutting of the procedure, because only in the procedure lay protection for the individual. But it had, in fact, been cut and dried.

  There had been no reasonable doubt that Pierson would waive preliminary hearing; no possible doubt that Magistrate Barrsmith, in view of the waiver, would order him held without bail. There had not been any actual doubt that the police desire to have Franklin Martinelli kept in storage would be acquiesced in; even less that the Grand Jury, after satisfying itself of a prima facie case, would return indictments. All that was doubtful lay ahead, as it had lain from the start. Could they make the case stick when it came to trial? Nothing else mattered but that.

  The rub there was evident.

  “We can’t show exclusive opportunity,” Weigand said. “Or even exclusive motive. The defense can raise a doubt. How about Martinelli? the defense will say. How about Cleo Harper? How about Elliot as murderer and suicide? We’re going to need more. A lot more, Sergeant.”

  “Yeah,” Mullins agreed. He drank thin coffee out of a thick cup. “And if Mrs. North gets in with her theory about somebody stealing Mr. Beck—Jeeze!”

  Mrs. North wouldn’t get in with that theory, Weigand promised himself and Mullins. It was going to be hard enough without that. Mrs. North was not going to get in at all. Not this time. He promised himself that. He promised Mullins that. This time things were going in an orderly fashion.

  “Yeah?” Mullins said. “Yeah? You mean it ain’t going to be screwy, Loot?”

  Absolutely not, Weigand assured Mullins—and himself. Not any screwier than it was, already, at any rate. Mrs. North’s preposterous—and away from her he realized just how preposterous—theory of a Nazi plot to kidnap—steal—Dan Beck and substitute a spurious Dan Beck was not going to reach the tender ears of a trial jury. This trial jury was going to hear far too much as it was.

  Having made this very clear to Mullins, Weigand was a little embarrassed, on finishing dinner, to explain that he was going to drop in on Dan Beck. Just to check up on a thing or two, he said, vaguely. It might, for example, be helpful to run over Elliot’s alibi again, just in case the defense brought Elliot into it as a red herring. It would help if they could, at least, knock that out cold by proving that Elliot could not possibly have killed Ann Lawrence.

  Mullins looked at Lieutenant Weigand thoughtfully, and Weigand returned the look with challenge.

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said, after a pause. “I didn’t say anything.”

  In not saying anything, Bill Weigand admitted that evening to Dorian, Sergeant Mullins had shown the restraint proper in a sergeant who does not agree with a lieutenant. But in the things he pointedly had not said, Mullins would have been right. Weigand’s second visit to the almost too ample, too restrainedly luxurious, apartment of Dan Beck had been a wild goose chase.

  “Or,” he added, thinking of Mrs. North, “a wild herring chase. Because there’s nothing in Pam’s theory. Nothing at all.”

  He was firm about it; firmer, Dorian thought, than was entirely necessary.

  “Of course, Bill,” Dorian pointed out, “there doesn’t have to be anything in Pam’s theories. It isn’t a law of nature that there should be. It’s just a—a custom.”

  “There isn’t in this,” Bill insisted, almost as if she had not agreed with him. “Dan Beck is Dan Beck. Simply that and nothing more, like the primrose. Which after all was just a primrose.”

  “Of course,” Dorian agreed. “If you want to look at it that way.”

  Bill demanded to be told what other way there was, and Dorian said, “Darling! You’re tired. It’s been an awful day.”

  “Well,” he said, “Beck was very comfortable, anyway. I was just checking on the Elliot alibi, you understand. All very routine. And incidentally, without making much of it, on where he was yesterday afternoon and evening. At this time and that time.”

  “Mrs. Pennock,” Dorian said. “And Mr. Elliot. Yes,”

  He was, Bill told her, in his apartment, working on his speech for that evening. He was alone, as he always was when he wrote. He had repeated, with that charmingly deprecating air, his account of his idiosyncrasies as a writer. Always resolutely alone, with the door satisfactorily locked; always picking out the words of his “message”—but the tone had been even more amusedly deprecating at the word—on a portable typewriter. And always copying the product himself, again on the portable.r />
  “Because,” Bill explained, “he has little tricks that he plays on himself, to guide him in reading. He puts several spaces between words if he wants to go slow and emphatically. He capitalizes words and underlines words, for different purposes, and puts in little asterisks and things. He says that nobody else could do it the way he wants it done. He has his own little systems.”

  Dorian said it sounded reasonable enough to her. Bill agreed that it did, also, to him. At any rate, that was what Dan Beck had been doing all the afternoon and evening before—from around two in the afternoon until, at a few minutes before eight, he left the apartment for the studios of the Trans-Continental System. It wasn’t, obviously, much of an alibi. It wasn’t an alibi at all. He could have left any time—he could have spent the whole afternoon and evening murdering people if he chose.

  “Except,” Dorian pointed out, “that he wouldn’t have had any script. And apparently he had a script, because Pam heard it and decided that he had been stolen because he wasn’t like himself.”

  Bill said that he could, obviously, have written the script in the morning, if it came to that. Leaving time for an afternoon’s killing.

  “But,” Dorian said, “you think he didn’t.”

  It was a statement, or almost a statement.

  “There’s no reason in the world to think he did,” Bill told her, with emphasis. “No reason except a crazy notion of Pam North’s that he doesn’t seem to be himself on the radio any more. Well, he seemed to be himself this afternoon, all right.”

  He had seemed, Bill amplified, to be precisely the Dan Beck of two days previous—bland and comfortable, not at all like a man who was dangerous to anybody. His two elderly servants had radiated comfort and—hominess. The butler had welcomed Bill this time, and had remembered him politely and taken him almost at once to the big, sprawling room in which he had seen Beck before. But Beck had not been awaiting him this time, but had come through another door after several minutes, with a paper in his hand and his hair disturbed and wearing glasses. These things had made him look less than ever like a danger to society, a man engaged in a perilous impersonation of a man performing in a cage under the threats of implacable keepers. He had looked at Weigand over the tops of his glasses, and his face, which had had a preoccupied expression, took on an expression of concentration and gravity.

  “Dreadful about poor John,” he said, at once. “Unbelievably dreadful.”

  The voice was the same thing of beautiful resonance. It was impossible to forget the voice, once having heard it; it was impossible to think of its being successfully impersonated. Dan Beck was Dan Beck; seeing him again, Weigand found his faint suspicions—based, after all, on nothing more tangible than a Pam North hunch—had faded instantly. It was absurd to think of any of the things he and Pam had thought; hard to feel any part of the animus which so clearly moved the police commissioner. Dan Beck was an earnest, comfortable, American man in his middle years; as disarming as a rocking chair on a front porch.

  Assuming that Beck referred to the death of John Elliot, Weigand had agreed in its dreadfulness.

  “He was a young man,” Beck had said, in the tone of a man who was not. “He was brilliant. It is—it is hard to believe. It is horrible to think what is just under the surface of our society, Lieutenant; how close under the surface the animal runs. A young man alone in the park—sudden violence—death. Things like that are frightening,”

  Weigand had agreed. Murder was always frightening. But this had not been, he pointed out, a simple case of a violent attack, motive robbery. This wasn’t a “mugging” case.

  “No?” Beck had said, seeming doubtful. He had urged Weigand to sit down, insisted that he have a cocktail. Weigand had had a cocktail, while Beck matched it with milk. “Are you certain of that, Lieutenant?” Beck asked, after they were settled. “Of course, you must have reason to feel that it was not so—simple. So—elemental.”

  Only, Weigand agreed, that Elliot had been shot, not mugged. Only that it would have been too much of a coincidence. Beck looked at Weigand carefully.

  “You don’t, I gather,” he said, “entertain this suicide theory the newspapers have been hinting about? The theory that he killed Ann Lawrence, and the others, and then himself?”

  Weigand let his voice sound surprised. Elliot was, he pointed out, fully cleared of the Lawrence murder by Beck’s own story. And the other murders had been part of the Lawrence murder.

  “I’m certain I’m right,” Beck said. “He couldn’t have killed Ann. I’ve—I’ve been worrying about it, Lieutenant. If some word of mine led you—the police—to drop all possibility of John’s guilt, and so leave him free to go on—and then if he were really not innocent as he seemed to me and all this might have been stopped—. I could never forgive myself if that were true, Lieutenant.”

  Weigand had recognized and admitted the inner doubts which assail men, even when they have no reason to doubt, if tragedy results from something done or left undone. So a railroad tower-man, after a wreck, might torture himself with questions. Had he pushed back the proper lever after the freight had taken the siding, leaving the line clear for the hurrying express? He could have sworn he had—but had he? Or had he made some dreadful, now irremediable, mistake?

  “But I have thought it over and over,” Beck went on, his voice earnest. “I have gone over and over it in my memory. I can’t have been mistaken. I don’t see how I can have been mistaken. I don’t see how Elliot could have killed Ann. I don’t see how it would have been possible.”

  Weigand said that all men had doubts like that.

  “Is there any way he could have-done it?” Beck insisted. “Any device? Could I have been wrong?”

  “I don’t see any way,” Bill Weigand said. “I think you’re worrying yourself needlessly, Mr. Beck.”

  “But have you tested it?” Beck insisted. “Tested it thoroughly?”

  “As thoroughly as was possible,” Weigand told him. They had not been able to lay hands on Elliot himself, which had been an evident handicap. But on the story that Mr. Beck himself told, it was impossible to see any way that Elliot could have had time—granting he had had everything else needful—to kill Ann Lawrence.

  “I hope you’re right,” Beck said. “I devoutly hope you’re right, Lieutenant. But I’ll be frank—it worries me. It still worries me. Because it was I, in the last analysis, who made you believe in his innocence. And if you had thought him guilty you’d have—laid hands on him. Before he could kill these others. I am convinced of that, Lieutenant.”

  It was possible, Weigand agreed. If they had devoted all their efforts to running down Elliot, if they had been convinced of his guilt instead of three-fourths convinced of his innocence—they might have caught him. But there was no use thinking what they might have done.

  “I know,” Beck said. “I try not to. But it keeps coming back. Perhaps I was wrong, somehow.”

  His insistence, while understandable; began to seem excessive.

  “You haven’t remembered anything, have you, Mr. Beck?” Weigand wanted to know. “Anything that—leaves a loophole? Anything you didn’t tell me earlier?”

  “No,” Beck said. “Nothing, Lieutenant. It is only—only a feeling. There isn’t any logic in it. It is a feeling, based on a—a fear. And on knowledge of human fallibility.” He smiled. “Including my own,” he said. “Most certainly including my own.”

  Then, Weigand said, he would advise Mr. Beck to forget it. It was partly to learn that, he said, that he had bothered Mr. Beck again. Because, of course, they had to give thought to the possibility that the case had ended in Elliot’s suicide. They had to be as sure as they humanly could be that Elliot was a victim, not a murderer who had found his own way out.

  “To the best of my belief,” Mr. Beck said, “to the best of my knowledge and belief—isn’t that how it’s said?—Elliot couldn’t have killed Ann Lawrence. Unless he was more devious than I can imagine.”

  “Or than I can,�
� Weigand said, shortly. He wondered, fleetingly, if all this qualification meant, really, that Beck was trying to hedge; that if the police insisted, he would become less certain of the alibi he had given Elliot. The thought passed over Weigand’s mind, leaving only the faintest of traces. It was not that, Weigand thought; it was a case of a worrying, over-conscientious mind.

  It had taken only a few minutes to get from Beck the fact that Beck had nothing but his word to support his statement that he had been alone in his study working all the previous afternoon and evening. Weigand documented this in a pigeon-hole, in which it presumably would languish. It went with the information, gathered earlier, that Franklin Martinelli had been sent on an errand after lunch and had not gone back to the shipping room; that Cleo Harper had left her office early, pleading a bad headache; that Alfred Pierson could have been out and about. The last fact did not go in a pigeon-hole. It went in Pierson’s record; it was turned over to the District Attorney’s office, for, action.

  Weigand had left after that, he told Dorian, and the motherly woman who helped her husband take care of Mr. Beck had been in the foyer to bow and smile—and not this time to peer after him.

  “Why do you suppose she did before?” Dorian wanted to know. Bill shrugged. He supposed, merely curiosity. Lieutenants of detectives, Homicide Bureau, might come a dime a dozen to people of Dorian’s experience, and still be a novelty to a motherly, elderly servant.

  “They’re not a dime a dozen to me,” Dorian said. “They’re—oh, ever so much more valuable. A dime apiece, at least.”

  That, Bill said, was fine of her. That made him feel expensive, and prized. She shied a pillow from the corner of the sofa at him and he carried it back, with the announced intention of making her eat it. There was a short scuffle, of which Dorian’s eating the pillow was not the result.

  “Well,” Dorian said, somewhat later, “how we do carry on. After all this time, too.”