Murder Out of Turn

by Frances Lockridge

  It was, he knew, very near the end of the party when Jean Corbin ended a dance near where he was sitting, and sat down beside him and said:

  “They say you are a detective.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “I’m trying,” he said, “to be on vacation, though.” He patted his pockets. “No handcuffs,” he added. “No gun.” The gun was back at the Norths’, locked in a bag, and he had no handcuffs. There was a badge in his pocket, however.

  “It must be interesting,” Jean Corbin said. “Thinking ahead of people. Outwitting them. Letting them think they are too clever and then—snap!”

  Weigand smiled and said it seldom worked out that way. Usually, he said, it was a question of getting hold of somebody who knew something, and getting him to tell what he knew. A stool-pigeon; a man who might be expected to grow talkative if he had to go too long without narcotics; a man who stayed unmolested on sufferance, and the promise of a willing tongue. Those things, and what one came to know of certain patterns of criminal behavior.

  “I don’t mean professional criminals,” the slim, dark girl with the sharply cut face assured him. “I mean—oh, murderers who haven’t police records or anything, and kill—what shall I say?—privately, for private ends.”

  Weigand nodded, and said he assumed she did. Most people thought of crime like that, he said. But most crime was professional and its detection took a memory for faces and for facts, and a knowledge of who, among all the talkers the department knew of, might be the man to talk to the point. That and organization, and having plenty of men to cover the ground.

  “It’s seldom the detective’s wits against those of the gentlemanly murderer,” he said. “Too bad, isn’t it?”

  “But sometimes—?” she insisted.

  Weigand said of course, sometimes. And that then it was usually a lot of work, with no assurance of success.

  “Murder is seldom ingenious, outside books,” he said. “And when it is, it is often successfully hidden.” He grinned at her. “Only don’t try it,” he added. “Sometimes we do catch on, and you might be unlucky.”

  She shook her head and said she wouldn’t.

  “Not even Hardie, the lummox,” she said. “Although when he let that one get by this afternoon I could have—”

  Saunders’ ears apparently caught their owner’s name, to which ears are always so marvelously attuned. At any rate, he came over and stood in front, and beamed down.

  “What’s this I hear?” he demanded. “What’s this?”

  “I was telling him I thought I was going to have to kill you because of this afternoon,” Jean explained. “But he talked me out of it. You owe him your life.”

  “Good,” Saunders said. “Thanks, old man. Keep an eye on her, will you? They say you’re a cop.”

  He seemed pleasantly drunk and amiable.

  Jean looked at the watch on her wrist, and said suddenly that she thought she would go. It was after one, she said, impossible as it sounded. The party seemed unabated but, as Weigand looked it over, it was appreciably thinned out. Dorian had gone, for one, and apparently Helen Wilson with her; the discontented face of Thelma Smith also had vanished. The Abels, together now, and the Norths, also together, were talking and Mrs. North caught Weigand’s eye and her eyebrows indicated Jean and went up. Both Fullers were mixing drinks and somebody was urging Van Horst to play again. Jean got up and drew a light coat around her.

  “Is your cabin near?” Weigand asked. “Should I walk along with you?”

  She smiled and said it would be nice, if he wanted to. They walked through a mist that was creeping higher from the lake and now dulled Weigand’s flashlight as they went along a path which seemed to circle the lake. The path dipped toward the lake, and another joined it from the right and the sumach was still growing closely. Then Jean turned up, away from the water, and the moonlight outlined another cabin, rather smaller than the others. They stepped in and Jean said to wait a moment while she got a light. A match flared and she lighted lamps. Then she said “brrr!

  “It’s cold in here,” she said. “The fire’s—well, that’s odd. It isn’t quite out, is it? It’s smoldered along since this morning, evidently.”

  Bill Weigand crossed to the fireplace.

  “It needs stirring,” he said, and stirred it resolutely. A flame shot up.

  “It needs more wood,” Weigand said. “If you’ll tell me where—?”

  “In the still-room,” she said. “Through that door.”

  The Corbin cabin differed from the others Weigand had seen. It was considerably smaller, in its central mass. But a one-room wing had been built beyond the kitchen; built solidly, with a concrete floor. There was wood piled in it, and a few garden tools and a two-gallon can for kerosene. Weigand picked up an armful of wood, went back, built up the fire and said:

  “Still-room?”

  Jean was sitting on a bench in front of the fire, huddling toward it. She held out her hands to the flame as she explained.

  “It was a still-room,” she said. “Really a still-room. That was before I took the cabin. The man who had had it was a broker before 1929, and then he turned bootlegger in a small way, and Van Horst let him build a room. He made it solider than the rest of the cabin, I guess to keep the fumes in, or something. So I store things in it—wood and kerosene and just general rubbish.”

  Her voice sounded tired, Weigand decided. And, anyway, the Norths would wonder about him. She thanked him for building up the fire, and for being company, but did not urge that he stay. The mist had grown thicker when Weigand stepped out into it, and took a path which he thought was the one they had come by. And almost instantly he was lost, because this path branched and dwindled and seemed to cross another, and ended at a long, rough dock extending into the lake. A boat floated at the end of the dock.

  The mist which baffled the flashlight, and the crossing paths and the close-growing sumach, proved unexpectedly difficult. Weigand tried one path, but it ended in a dark cabin which was not the Corbin cabin. Another ended in an outhouse. A third seemed to abandon life entirely in the thick of the undergrowth. Weigand said, “Damn!” when he came to that. He began to feel that he had been pushing his way through the mist for a long time. Then for the first time in hours, he turned his flashlight beam on his wristwatch. It showed 1:20. He must, he thought, already have been gone from the Corbin cabin almost a quarter of an hour, and he had evidently got no place. He stopped and listened.

  “Oh, oh, my honey, have a—on me!” he heard. That was the party. He could fill in the pause, because he had heard it filled in before. Everybody was singing, and when they came to the pause they all sniffed resolutely. “Morphine Bill and Cocaine Sue” was being shouted happily to his right. He turned toward it, and found the faintest of the paths. He started along it and then, drawing in his breath quickly, he stopped.

  There was something dark and inert lying across the path in front of him, and when his light found it, it was the body of a woman. She lay face down, sprawled shapelessly, and around her head dark wetness caught the light from his torch. Weigand had seen enough death to know he was seeing it again. He bent quickly to throw the light on the face, and to see it he had to lift the head a little. He was flooded, as he did so, with the certainty that he already knew what he would see. And then he let his breath out so that the tiny rush of it was almost a whistle.

  Because what he saw was not what he had, in that moment, known he would see. What he saw was the face of Helen Wilson.

  Helen Wilson was dead. In the left side of her throat was a ragged gash. But blood was not flowing from it any longer.

  4

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10:

  1:23 A.M. TO 3 A.M.

  Weigand was a man on vacation in the country when he knelt beside the body, but he was a policeman when he stood up. He was a cop and wanted more cops. He moved away from the body, remembering where he stepped, and around it in a wide circle, bending under the low, branching crowns of the sumach. When
he came out on a path it was only a little distance from the Fullers’ cabin, and he covered the distance quickly. But at the door he paused a moment and then entered casually. It would have been hard to detect more than casual greeting in Weigand’s glance when it caught Mr. North’s eyes. Mr. North, looking a little surprised, came across to him.

  Weigand’s hand, pressing on his friend’s arm, guided him out of the cabin and to a shadow.

  “Something—?” Mr. North said. Weigand nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Wilson girl. Down in the sumach.”

  His tone told more than his words.

  “Somebody—?” North began, and then there was a quick movement beside them.

  “Something’s happened!” Mrs. North said. “Jerry—are you all right, Jerry? Bill?”

  You didn’t keep things from Mrs. North, or try to. Weigand, speaking quickly, without emphasis, told them what he had found.

  “No!” Mrs. North said. “No. Not again.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “More than your share,” he agreed. “One murder ought to have been enough, certainly.” He paused. “More than hers, too,” he said. “There’s something wrong about it. She wasn’t the one asking for it.”

  “No,” said Mrs. North. “Oh, it’s dreadful. She was—She was so nice. And our lovely lake!” She paused. “Our lake,” she said. She was silent, her hand on her husband’s arm, convulsively tight. They waited for her a moment and then she said: “All right, now. What do we do?”

  She, Weigand told her, did nothing—or rather, she went back to the party and showed nothing, which would be a lot to do. North went to a telephone—“Ireland’s?” Weigand asked, and North nodded. They needed State policemen, fast. He would be waiting where the body was.

  “I don’t want anybody—cleaning up,” he said.

  The Norths nodded. Mrs. North breathed deeply, so that she was no longer trembling, and Mr. North moved off along a path, casually at first and then more quickly. Weigand lighted a cigarette, looked around, and was gone in the mist.

  It was hardest for Mrs. North. It was hard to take up a drink again; hard to listen to Dr. Abel, who was talking about the war, and the turning times which made might seem right again, and speculating whether the human animal could, after all, find another basis which would not crumble. “The right to act as you please, taking responsibility for the act,” he said. “Accepting another’s right, the group’s right, to stop you, to retaliate. Perhaps those are the only rights—to protect yourself.” It sounded vague, academic, almost meaningless, when you were waiting for the cry of sirens.

  And then there was no cry of sirens. After a few long minutes Jerry North came back, and smiled at someone and lifted a drink from a tray and came across to her, still smiling. His fingers touched her arm and there was pressure for a moment, and assurance, and when she looked at him his eyes seemed to nod an answer to her question, although his head did not move. It was almost no time after that before there was the bumping purr of a motorcycle engine, and with it Mr. North drew her away, and out of the cabin into the shadow which the house blacked out of the moonlight.

  A State trooper was propping up his motorcycle and then coming toward them. The moonlight shone on him and then he was in the shadow.

  “North?” he said. “Gerald North? You’re the man who telephoned?”

  “Down here,” North said. “You’ll want to talk to Weigand.”

  “Yes?” said the trooper. “All right.”

  Weigand heard them coming. His flashlight glowed a moment in the mist, then went out; then glowed again. Weigand said, “Hello, trooper,” in a cop’s voice and the trooper looked at him curiously. Then the trooper looked down and said:

  “Christ!”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “That’s the way it is, trooper. You’ll want to get on the phone.”

  The trooper knelt by the body.

  “Yeh,” he said. “Only I did, mister. The B.C.I. boys will be along.”

  He stood up.

  “Who are you, lady?” he said to Mrs. North. “Who brought you here? And you, fellow—who are you?”

  Weigand told him and he said, “Oh, yeah?” Weigand’s hand came out of his pocket with a badge cupped in the palm. “Yes, sir,” the trooper said. “Lieutenant Heimrich will be along. You want to tell me anything, Lieutenant?”

  Weigand said he could tell what he knew, and did. He said that, except the Norths, nobody else knew.

  “One other guy knows,” the trooper said.

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “One other guy knows, all right. But we’ll wait for Heimrich. He’s coming from Hawthorne?”

  The trooper said he was, with some of the boys. And perhaps somebody from the D.A.’s office, and the medical examiner. “They’ll come from Carmel, though,” he explained. “They ought to be here first.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “What do we do?” Mr. North asked. “We just wait? Who do we wait for?”

  “Men from the B.C.I.—Bureau of Criminal Identification—of the State Police,” Weigand told him. “They called it a ‘Scotland Yard’ in the papers for a while. It’s a specially trained detective force, with detachments in each of the main barracks—each with an inspector, ranked as a lieutenant, in charge. They take over for the district attorneys in counties, like this, where they don’t run to county detectives.” He paused, looking down at the body. “They’re pretty good, too, aren’t they, trooper?”

  “Yes, sir,” the trooper said. “They’re pretty good.”

  They came after a little, and this time there were sirens and then there was no keeping it from anybody. Lieutenant Heimrich was a short, powerful man in civilian clothes, and there were a sergeant and two troopers with him, also out of uniform. And there were other troopers on motorcycles and more in two open cars. Still later, although they had a much shorter distance to come, there was a little, fussy man who owned a large, resonant voice and the title of district attorney, and a physician from the medical examiner’s office. But by that time the Fullers’ party had shattered, and, photographers’ lights tore through the fog to center on and around Helen Wilson’s body, and there were men tramping through the sumach and calling heavily to one another. The Norths were back in the Fuller cabin, then, and troopers sat with what remained of the party.

  Van Horst stood with Weigand and Heimrich near the body while the doctor bent over it, and held a flashlight close to the wound and shook his head. Then, after a good while, there was the clang of an ambulance bell on the road and new lights swept the Fullers’ lawn, cluttered with cars and motorcycles, and two men carried a long bundle off on a stretcher.

  And after that Heimrich appeared in the door of the Fuller cabin and looked over those who were still there, and Weigand came in behind him and looked, too, and smiled faintly at Jerry and Pam North, and at the Fullers when his eyes met theirs.

  “All right,” Heimrich said, suddenly, gratingly. “You can all go home and to bed. All of you who live here at the lake, or are visiting here. Are there any who don’t?”

  Nobody answered.

  “O.K.,” Heimrich said. “Go to your cabins and stick around. Don’t try to go anywhere. Stay inside.”

  Weigand’s lips twisted a little and he said something, softly, to the State Police lieutenant.

  “Yeh,” Heimrich said. “Sure.” He looked at the very sobered civilians. “Only don’t go any farther than your cabins, get me?” he said. Nobody said anything for a moment, and then Mrs. North said, unexpectedly:

  “Thank you.”

  Heimrich looked at her darkly and then almost smiled. It was a very transient smile, however.

  “Very well,” he said. “Get along. I’ll have men scattered around, so if anybody had thought of leaving—” He paused. “As I figure it,” he said, “only one of you would want to leave. If I were in his place, I wouldn’t try it.”

  He turned, suddenly, said “See you in the morning?” to Weigand, and went out. Weigand’s eyes bec
koned the Norths. The three of them went back along the path to the Norths’ cabin, where the fire still burned. Mr. North piled logs on it.

  “Well,” he said, “what did they find out?”

  “Not much,” Weigand said. “Yet,” he added. “They will, though—they’re good at the job.” He hesitated. “Don’t spread anything I tell you, of course,” he said. “Here’s what we—they—know so far.”

  Helen Wilson had been dead for some time when Weigand stumbled on her body. She had been stabbed in the throat, with, apparently, a bulky and dull knife, which had torn as well as cut. She had been standing, probably facing her murderer, and had been struck a few feet from where she fell. Blood had spurted out on the sumach. She had twisted in falling, away from the murderer. The murderer had, apparently, then forced his way through the sumach toward the lake, although that was not certain.

  “There was a broken branch,” Weigand said. “We’ll look for blood in the morning—the knife may have dripped.”

  “Ou—!” said Mrs. North. “How horrible. With the moonlight on it—”

  “He may have been going to throw the weapon in the lake,” Weigand said. “Or he may have wanted—well, to wash.”

  Mr. North nodded.

  “The blood would have spurted, I suppose?” he said. “So he probably couldn’t have come back to the party. It would have been on his clothes. If it was, of course, somebody from the party.”

  Weigand said it looked that way. That was one reason why Heimrich had not held those still at the party for immediate questioning. That, and the desire to know as much as he could before he started questioning.

  “He wants light on it,” Weigand said. “Literally as well as figuratively. The fog makes it worse. His idea is to keep everybody rounded up until morning, when he can see how people look by something better than kerosene lamps. He figures that any cleaning up the murderer had to do has already been done, so there’ll be no harm.”