Killing the Goose

by Frances

  “You know,” Jerry said, after a while, “I never thought we’d be churning here in a New York apartment. Ten floors up, particularly. Did you?”

  Pam said it was the war. The war had changed a lot of things and the changes had outlasted it. They both looked into the bowl, trying to see the future in it. Then Pam spoke, suddenly.

  “Jerry!” she said. “You’re spattering!”

  “I—” Jerry began, and stopped. He was certainly spattering. Because, as suddenly as Pam had spoken, the whipped cream had come apart. Part of it was thin and spattering and part of it—

  “For God’s sake!” Jerry said, in a shocked voice. “Butter!”

  It was butter. It was sticking to the eggbeater. There was not a great deal of it. It was not exactly a solid. But it was beyond doubt butter. The Norths looked at one another with surprise and delight and disbelief.

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “We made butter!”

  “I know,” Jerry said. “It’s like—like finding gold. Or a good manuscript. It’s—it’s very strange.”

  They took the bowl out to the kitchen and scraped the butter off the eggbeater and poured off what they supposed was buttermilk—although it didn’t taste like buttermilk—and squeezed the water out of the butter as Pam had been told to do. And they were wrapping up almost a quarter of a pound of butter in oiled paper, and still not really believing it, when the telephone rang. Pam was wrapping, and thereupon wrapped more intently, so Jerry was stuck with the telephone.

  The voice on the telephone was familiar, and Jerry said, “Yes, Bill?” When she heard him, Pamela put the butter into the icebox quickly and came in and stood in front of Jerry and made faces until he noticed her. Jerry said, “Wait a minute, Bill,” and when he looked at her Pam spoke.

  “Tell him we made butter,” she said. “Tell him he’s the first to know.”

  “Pam says we made butter, Bill,” Jerry said. “We did, too. Almost a quarter of a pound.”

  He listened.

  “What did he say?” Pam said.

  “He said ‘well,’” Jerry told her.

  “Was he excited?” Pam wanted to know.

  “Were you excited, Bill?” Jerry said into the telephone. Then he spoke to Pam. “He says ‘reasonably,’” Jerry told her. “But he says he’s got a murder if we don’t mind.”

  “Oh,” Pam said. “All right. Tell him we’re sorry.”

  “Pam says we’re sorry, Bill,” Jerry said into the telephone. “What?”

  His voice was suddenly different and, as she heard the change, Pam’s own expressive face was shadowed. Because something Bill had said had made murder real to Jerry, and that would make it real to her. She did not want murder to be real again—not ever again.

  “Yes,” he said. “A woman fiftyish—solidly built—gray hair? With a p instead of a b as it happens. Yes. She’s been working for us. At the office. Research.”

  He listened for almost a minute and there was a queer expression on his face. Then he seemed to break in. “I can explain that,” he said. “She was doing research for us—preliminary research. For a book we’re getting out on the subject. Do you want the details?”

  He listened again.

  “Naturally,” he said. “She has relatives in the city, I think. But I’ll come around. Although from what you say there doesn’t seem to be much doubt.”

  He listened again.

  “All right,” he said. “The morgue. I’ll be along.”

  He replaced the receiver and looked at Pam a moment, his thoughts far from her. Then he brought them back.

  “A woman named Amelia Gipson,” he said. “She was working at the office—had been for about a month. Somebody seems to have poisoned her. In the public library, of all places. Bill wants me to make a preliminary identification before he gets in touch with her relatives.”

  “In the public library?” Pam said. “At Forty-second Street? The big one?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “What a strange place,” Pam North said. “It’s—it’s always so quiet there.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “She was reading about murders at the time, apparently. For us. For the murder book I told you about. My Favorite Murder—working title. Remember?”

  Pam said she remembered. With a writer for each crime—a writer who wrote about murder. She remembered.

  “Miss Gipson was getting together preliminary data,” Jerry said. “We promised them that. It was an odd job for her, come to think of it. She used to be a college professor—or something like it. Anyway, she used to teach in a college. She was a trained researcher. But it was an odd job for her.”

  It ended oddly enough, Pam thought, and said. It ended very oddly.

  “I think I’ll go with you,” Pam said then. “It’s so strange about its being the public library.”

  Jerry thought she shouldn’t, but she did.

  The body was under a sheet and they pulled the sheet back from the face. Confidence no longer sat on the face; the features were twisted, curiously. But it was Amelia Gipson and Jerry turned to Lieutenant William Weigand of Homicide and nodded.

  “What?” Jerry said. “And how?”

  Bill Weigand told him what.

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “Suddenly, sitting in the library, she was very sick. As she would be. Then in about an hour she was dead. In Bellevue. That’s all we know, at the moment.”

  “You don’t eat anything in the library,” Pam pointed out. “Do you?”

  Bill smiled faintly and shook his head. That was it, he said; that was part of it. Unless you were on the staff, you didn’t eat in the library. You didn’t drink.

  “So,” Jerry pointed out, “she had taken it—had been given it—before she went to the library.”

  Bill Weigand shook his head. He said the time didn’t fit. He said she had been at the library for something like two hours—probably more—when she became ill.

  “It doesn’t wait that long,” he said. “We’ve established that. The dose she seems to have got would have made her violently ill in half an hour or so. Her book slips were time stamped at 7:33. Allow her some time to find the books she wanted in the catalogues, fill out the slips—say a quarter of an hour—and we have her in the library at fifteen after seven, or thereabouts. Of course, she may have left the library and come back. If she didn’t, she was poisoned in the library. Presumably while she was sitting at one of the tables in the reading-room—the North Reading Room.”

  “You mean,” Pam said, “somebody just came along and said ‘Sorry to interrupt your reading, but do you mind drinking some poison?’ Because I don’t believe it.”

  “Not that way, obviously,” Jerry said. “You’re getting jumpy, Pam.”

  “Not any way like it that I can see,” Pam said. “And I’m not getting jumpy. Do you, Bill?”

  Practice helped. Bill did not even have to check back to the clause before the clause.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “And it happened. Therefore—a job for us. For Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley and his helpers. Mullins. Stein. Me.”

  “Well,” Pam said “She worked in Jerry’s office.” It was merely statement; it held implications.

  Mullins was in the shadows. Mullins spoke.

  “O’Malley won’t like it, Loot,” Mullins said. “He sure as hell won’t like it. He likes ’em kept simple.”

  “But,” Pam said, “it isn’t simple. Hello, Sergeant Mullins. Is it?”

  “Hello, Mrs. North,” Mullins said. “No. But the inspector don’t want you in none of them. None. He says you make ’em complicated. Hard, sort of.”

  “All right, Sergeant,” Bill Weigand said, and there was only the thin edge of amusement in his voice. “She was an employee of Mr. North. It was inevitable that we call him. For the moment—until we get in touch with her relatives—we can assume he represents her interests. Right?”

  “Say,” Mullins said. “That’s right, ain’t it, Loot?”

&n
bsp; “Of course it is,” Pam said. “Where do we go, Bill? First?”

  Bill shrugged. There were a hundred directions. The library. The office of North Books, Inc. Amelia Gipson’s apartment.

  “Mullins is going to the library,” he said. “Stein’s there, and some of the boys. I’m going to the apartment.” He paused and smiled a little. “I should think,” he said, “that Jerry has a right to accompany me, Pam.”

  “So should I,” Pam North said. “Shall we start now? It isn’t—it isn’t very nice in here.” She looked around the morgue. “It never is,” she said, thoughtfully.

  While Bill Weigand picked up a parcel containing Miss Gipson’s handbag, and signed a receipt for it, and while they got into the big police car Pam had been silent. Now, as they started toward Washington Square and the Holborn Annex she spoke.

  “Why,” Pam said, “didn’t she kill herself?”

  “Miss Gipson?” Jerry said, in a startled voice. “She would no more.…” Then he broke off and looked at Bill. “Which is true,” he said, after a moment. “She wouldn’t think of it—wouldn’t have thought of it. But you didn’t know that, Bill. How did you know?”

  Bill nodded. He said he had been wondering why they didn’t ask him that.

  “That’s the way Inspector O’Malley wanted it,” he said. “That’s the way he thinks it ought to be. Simple. Suicide. Unfortunately, she wrote us a note.”

  “What kind of a note?” Pam said. “Non-suicide note?”

  Weigand looked at Pam North with approval. He said, “Right.”

  “She was taking notes,” he said. “On the Purdy murder. Writing them out very carefully in a notebook, in ink—very carefully and clearly. And we almost missed her note to us—did miss it the first time. Then Stein thought that while the last thing she had written almost fitted, it didn’t really fit. The last thing she wrote was: ‘I have been poisoned by—! It didn’t finish. Just ‘I have been poisoned by—’ and a scraggly line running off the page.”

  “Then how,” Pam said, “can even—can the inspector think it was suicide. If he still does.”

  Bill Weigand said the inspector still wanted to.

  “And,” he said, “he can make a talking point. You see, she was taking notes on a poison case. The death of a woman named Lorraine Purdy, who was killed, curiously enough, with sodium fluoride. Presumably by her husband, although we were supposed to think by accident. But it wasn’t accident—it was Purdy. He ran for it and got himself killed in an airplane accident. O’Malley wants to think that the last thing Miss Gipson wrote was part of her notes on the Purdy case.”

  He smiled faintly.

  “We can’t let him,” he said. “It almost fits. It doesn’t fit. Why was she taking notes on the Purdy case, Jerry?”

  Jerry explained that. It was not only the Purdy case. It was a series of cases—ten murder cases, all famous, all American. Her notes were to go to selected writers who were accepted as specialists in crime. “Like Edmund Pearson was,” Jerry amplified. Each was to write the story of one of the murders as a chapter in a book. Jerry was to publish the book. It had been his idea. It was not, he added, a new idea. Other publishers had done it; he had done it before himself, several years earlier. There was always a market for crime. As Pearson had proved; as Woollcott had proved; as dozens of lesser writers had proved.

  “We did the digging for them,” Jerry said. “Miss Gipson did the digging for us. She was a researcher.”

  When he decided on publishing the book and had needed somebody to do research, Jerry had decided against tying up anybody on his own staff—a rather small staff these days—on a long and detailed job. He had gone to a college placement bureau and Miss Gipson was the result. The rather unexpected result.

  “I’d supposed we’d get a girl just out of college,” Jerry North said. “Most of them are—the research girls. Miss Gipson was a surprise. She’d been a Latin teacher in a small, very good college for girls in Indiana—Ward College, I think it was. She got tired of it or something and decided on a new field. She was a little surprised when it turned out to be murder research, but she was doing a good job.”

  “I think,” Pam said, “she carried it too far.”

  They looked at her.

  “I only mean,” she said, “you don’t have to go to the length of getting murdered. It’s too—thorough.”

  The two men looked at each other and after a while Jerry said, “Oh.”

  3

  WEDNESDAY, 12:10 A.M. TO 2:20 A.M.

  You started with a body and tried to bring life back to it, Pam thought, looking around the room in which Miss Gipson had lived. That was what you did in murder—that was what Bill Weigand had to do. She looked at him, standing in the middle of the room and looking around it, his eyes quick. He was building—trying to build—in his own mind the person who had been Amelia Gipson. He started with the body of a middle-aged woman; a body growing cold on a slab in the morgue; a body which said certain things, but not enough. The body spoke of regular meals, of comfortable life, of the number of years lived, of the manner of death. It told—it would tell—what the last meal eaten by a living person had been, and how long it had been eaten before death. It told of past illnesses which had been endured and survived; of an appendicitis operation many years before; of virginity maintained until it withered.

  Those things the body in the morgue told of. But they were not the things which were most significant; which now were most vital. The body could not tell who had hated Amelia Gipson, or if anyone had loved her; it could not tell what she thought of things, and what others thought of her—of her tastes, her needs, her responsibilities. It could not tell where, in her life, had sprouted the seed of her death. These things—all the things Bill Weigand had to find out—lay now in the little things Amelia Gipson had left behind. They lay in this room, and its order; in the letters and notebooks and check-stubs in the secretary in the corner; in what men and women had seen and remembered about Miss Gipson that evening; in the contents of her medicine cabinet and her safe deposit box, if she had one. The things they had to know lay in what she had done in the past and what she had planned to do in the future. Research into death was at the same time research into life.

  “She used scent,” Pam said, suddenly. “Does that surprise you? Either of you?”

  “No,” Jerry said. “I don’t think she used perfume, Pam. I didn’t notice it at the office.”

  “You must have had a cold,” Pam said. “You didn’t mention it.”

  “I didn’t have it,” Jerry said.

  Pam said all right. She said in that case it was because he smoked too much. Clearly, Miss Gipson had used perfume. It was still in the room.

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I noticed it. But she didn’t wear any tonight. I noticed that, too.”

  “Something with ‘Fleur’ in it,” Pam said. “Fleur de Something or Other. Fleur de what?”

  Neither of the men knew. But Jerry admitted there was perfume in the room.

  “For evenings, probably,” Pam said. “Although it doesn’t seem in character, somehow. The way she looked. And being a Latin teacher in a girls’ school. I’d have thought castile soap and perhaps a little talcum, if anything.”

  Bill Weigand had crossed to the desk. He was looking through it, piling the contents of pigeonholes in neat order. He had left Miss Gipson’s purse lying on the coffee table. It was all right for her to look into it, Bill told Pam absently, when she asked.

  It was a very neat purse. Pam thought that it was much neater than any purse she had ever looked into—certainly much neater than her own. And it seemed almost empty. There was a change purse in it, containing a little more than twenty dollars. There was a social security card. No driver’s license. A fountain pen. Four neat squares of cleansing tissue. No compact. No lipstick. No lists of any kind, scrawled on the backs of envelopes. No scraps of material, no hairpins or loose stamps or unanswered correspondence. It was hardly recognizable as a woman�
��s handbag.

  “And no perfume,” Pam said aloud. “In it or on it. Which is odd.”

  Bill Weigand was reading a letter and Jerry stood by him, reading over his shoulder. Pam got up, leaving the handbag, and went into the bathroom. It was a neat bathroom. She opened the built-in medicine cabinet. There was a box of bicarbonate and a plastic drinking cup, a box of cleansing tissue, two toothbrushes and a can of tooth powder, a can of white talcum with no perceptible scent and a cardboard box from a druggist with a doctor’s name on it and the handwritten instructions: “One powder three times a day two hours after meals.” On a shelf inset under the medicine cabinet were a comb and brush and a box of hairpins. Nowhere that Pam could see was there any perfume.

  Nowhere in the apartment, she found, was there any perfume, except that which faintly haunted the air. So it was not Miss Gipson’s perfume, but had been worn by a guest. It was a tiny discovery and, having made it, Pam decided it was of no importance; that it was not even a discovery. Because the perfume had probably been worn by a chambermaid while she was cleaning up the room. Pam went over, satisfied, and stood beside Jerry, behind Bill Weigand.

  “Find anything, Pam?” Bill said, without looking up from the letter he was reading.

  “No,” Pam said. “Except that she didn’t wear perfume after all. It was a maid. Or somebody who came to see her. And she had indigestion. There are some powders in the medicine cabinet to be taken after meals. And there’s nothing much in her purse.”

  There had been more in it, Bill told her. One other object—a folding aluminum cup.

  “You mean,” Pam said, “one of those things made of rings that catch on each other? They always leak and I haven’t seen one for ages. I thought they went out when paper cups came in.”

  He meant that kind of a cup, Bill told her. He had not seen one for a long time either. But Miss Gipson had had one in her purse and it was now in the police laboratory, because—

  “Bill!” Pam said, “Jerry! To take her medicine in when she was away from home. After meals. Two hours after meals. But tonight she was a little late. Only not late enough.”