Murder Out of Turn

by Frances Lockridge

  “And you—?” Mr. North said.

  Weigand said he was merely a bystander, like anyone else. Possibly he would have asked a question or two at once, but Heimrich’s way was—well, Heimrich’s way.

  “He’s a good man,” Weigand said. “I’ve heard of him. Thorough, steady. He figures he can thrash it out in the morning when there’s less excitement, and when he knows more.”

  “But if something else happens before he gets started—” Mrs. North said. “If the murderer didn’t have everything cleaned up?” She paused. “Do you feel there’s something funny about it?” she asked the two men, suddenly. They looked at her, and saw that her eyes were wide and rather frightened.

  “Well—” said Mr. North and then he stopped and looked at Weigand. Weigand looked at them both a moment and then he nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “It feels funny. You know why, don’t you?”

  “Say it,” North said. “Go on, say it.”

  Weigand stood a moment, apparently thinking. Then he spoke softly.

  “Only that it’s the wrong girl,” he said. “But I told Heimrich and he thinks I’m crazy. He says she was facing the murderer and she couldn’t have been the wrong one. The murderer would have known.”

  “But it was dark,” Mrs. North insisted.

  Weigand said that was precisely the point. It wasn’t dark; not there and then, and as she was standing when she began to die.

  “You see,” he said, “the moonlight was full on her face. It couldn’t have been a mistake.”

  5

  SUNDAY

  8:15 A.M. TO 11 A.M.

  There was the sound of a coarse file rasped on the edge of an opened tin can and Weigand sat up in bed, angrily. The crow left a limb of the aging apple tree outside Weigand’s window and went to sit on a rock with another crow. Both of them dragged coarse files across the edges of opened tin cans. Weigand looked at his watch and learned that it was fifteen minutes past eight. He went to the window and stared at the crows and made bitter remarks about the peace of sleep in the country; about the peace of anything in the country.

  “Murders and crows!” Weigand told himself, indignantly, and pulled on sneakers over heavy woolen socks, gray slacks and a faded blue sweater. Then the scream froze him as he reached for a hairbrush. It was a woman’s scream and the sunlight shattered to let it through. It was a scream of terror and agony and for a moment it seemed to be everywhere. Then Weigand realized that it came diagonally across the lake from the north. He was out of his room and across the living-room, running, and on the porch. The scream came again, higher for a moment and then decrescendo with a horrible bubble in it. Then it was cut off.

  “My God!” said North, suddenly beside Weigand. “What—?”

  They stared down the lake, fixed. Smoke puffed up behind trees where the lake curved at the north and as they watched flame shot through it. Then a man shouted hoarsely from somewhere in that direction and there was the snort of a started motor. A siren whirred suddenly and there were more shouts. Weigand and North were over the porch rail, running toward the smoke. Mrs. North, in a rust-red robe, was on the porch behind them and the moment of time swelled up like a balloon. Then a man in State Police uniform came running around the cabin and went heavily, still running, down the path after her husband and Weigand. The moment broke and the porch door slammed behind Mrs. North as she ran back across the living-room.

  The clock on the chest said 8:21 as Mrs. North threw off the robe, jabbed herself into shorts and fumbled with buttons. She pulled on an old-rose sweater, fuzzy and high at the throat, and laced sneakers over her bare feet. Then she was running, too, down the path toward the rising smoke, through which flames laced. Men were shouting and there was the feel of someone running behind her and then, over the hills, there was the despairing cry of a siren and under it the distant roar of a heavy motor, running fast.

  It wasn’t the Fullers’. She knew that even before she saw their cabin dark in the shadow of an elm. Jane Fuller, in a blue overall, stood on the shadowed porch and cried, “Jean’s!” when Mrs. North ran toward her. She ran down the porch steps as Mrs. North paused and another trooper ran past her, brushing against the sleeve of the rose sweater. Jane ran on ahead of Mrs. North down the path which dipped toward the lake.

  Flame was leaping through the roof of Jean Corbin’s cabin and the heat forced them back. But already the fire truck from Patterson was crunching backward through the sumach and men were piling off it. Four ran with the end of a heavy hose toward the lake and two more spun the hose off the reel behind them. There were troopers and men from the cabins standing, held back by the heat. North and Weigand were well up, shielding their faces with their arms. Then the motor of the fire truck pounded and the hose swelled as water came through it from the lake. The nozzle dribbled, the stream arched from it, stiffened. There was a roar and a cloud of steam as it struck the fire.

  The flames were less all-conquering than they had looked to be. They fought the water, angrily, and subsided under it. Smoke and steam swirled up, died down.

  “Got it!” one of the firemen shouted.

  “Hold it off from the door,” Lieutenant Heimrich ordered. “We’re going in.”

  He and a trooper ran forward and North and Weigand ran with them. They were gone inside as Mrs. North cried:

  “No! Don’t!” after them.

  Then they were out again, dragging something and the water swished back where they had been, pouring through the door, drowning a red glow which licked at their heels. The four men were blackened, but the thing they drew after them out of the fire was blacker still and motionless. And horrible.

  There was nothing to do for Jean Corbin. There had not been anything to do for her since that scream of agony bubbled at the end and stopped half finished. There would have been nothing to do for her even then.

  Mr. North left the group and came to his wife and Jane Fuller, who were standing close together, and pulled both of them against him and then back from the group which had gathered around the charred body.

  “There’s nothing to do,” he said. “Come away. There’s nothing—”

  “Jean?” Pam North said, in a voice with not enough breath behind it.

  Mr. North nodded, then hesitated and nodded again.

  “Yes,” he said. “It would have to be, though it’s hard to tell anything from—”

  Then Weigand detached himself from the group and came toward them, and as he came he nodded to the question in North’s eyes.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s Jean Corbin.”

  “She—” said Mrs. North. “It was a dreadful way, wasn’t it?”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Only it wasn’t long,” he said. “That’s all you can say. She was in the center of it, and it was all over her—in—well, I should think in a kind of puff.”

  Then Heimrich called him and he went back to the group and the two talked together for a moment, and Weigand nodded. Then, while the firemen from Patterson still poured water on the cabin, troopers went to the little groups in which the Lone Lakers had gathered and said a few words and the groups broke and melted.

  “Go back to your cabins, the lieutenant says,” a trooper told the Norths and Jane Fuller, and Ben Fuller, as, leaving one of the other groups, he came to them. “Go to your own cabins and stay in them until he gets to you, the lieutenant says.”

  They started off.

  “Hey, North!” Weigand called, and Mr. North turned back. When Mrs. North went along the path and looked back he was standing with Heimrich and Weigand and a sergeant and one of the firemen, and they were looking at the cabin, which was only smoking a little, now. Almost half the cabin, and the still-room wing, seemed hardly to have been touched by the fire, Mrs. North noticed.

  She went into the Fullers’ cabin and they looked at one another and Fuller said, “Christ,” in a strange, flat tone. Then Jane made coffee and they drank it and said very little. After a rather long time Mr. Nort
h looked in and said, “Come on up to the cabin, Pam.” The Norths went together along the path and Mr. North held his wife’s arm and then, after a moment, her hand. Neither of them said anything.

  Weigand and Heimrich were at the cabin and as the Norths went in Weigand was talking.

  “I don’t see what other way it could be,” he said. “But these people live here; they know how people do things here. We’ll put it up to them.”

  Heimrich looked at the other policeman with doubt and inquiry in his expression. Weigand smiled suddenly, briefly, and said he would guarantee it.

  “Wash them out,” he said. “I had to, once. I’ll guarantee it.”

  “Well—” Heimrich said. “So—”

  “Here’s the setup,” Weigand said to the Norths. “We want your guess on it.”

  They had, he said, examined the cabin. The fire had apparently started near the fireplace, swept up the wall and through the roof. Jean Corbin’s body had been near the door, fallen toward it. The door was in the same wall as the fireplace and she had been cut off by the flames.

  “Not,” Weigand said, “that that would have made any difference, apparently. She must have been in front of the fire when it—leaped at her.”

  Mr. North raised inquiring eyebrows.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Wait.”

  The fire had burned more rapidly than it was easy to explain; more rapidly and fiercely, but over a comparatively limited area, with the fireplace as the center. The fireplace had several logs in it, only partly burned. The bench in front of the fireplace was almost burned through when they got in. A closed door had kept the flames out of the still-room wing, and out of the kitchen, and nothing in either room was touched.

  “Now,” Weigand said, “I was there about one-fifteen and built up the fire so that it would last the night. The fire was burning when I got there, but it was almost done and—” He paused suddenly. “Here’s something I forgot,” he said. “She was surprised that it was still burning; said she had started it in the morning but left it to die out during the day. She said something about its being better wood than she had thought. That may hook in.”

  “But how—?” Mrs. North said. “You think her nightgown or something—a robe, maybe—swished into the fire when she was starting it up and then—?”

  Weigand said that it could, of course, have been that way. He looked at Heimrich.

  “It still could have been,” Heimrich said. “So—We don’t know it wasn’t. We’re guessing.”

  “You people start fires with kerosene, don’t you?” Weigand asked the Norths, while he held up a hand toward Heimrich. “You and most of the people here, because it’s quicker and Marvin doesn’t sell kindling?”

  North nodded and said yes.

  “But,” he said, “kerosene—I mean, we’ve all used it for years. It was—a camp custom, you might call it.”

  “Everybody used it?” Weigand insisted. “It would be a safe guess by anybody that any other person up here used a cup or two of kerosene, poured over the logs, when he wanted to start a fire?”

  “Sure,” said Mr. North, while Mrs. North nodded. “But listen. Everybody here knows how to handle it—how much to put on, to stand back and toss a match if it is hot and smokes up and—”

  Weigand held up a hand at him.

  “Right,” he said. “Now—”

  They had checked over the cabin and, in the still-room, found a full two-gallon kerosene can. “Or almost full,” Weigand added. There was a little spilled around it, as if it had only recently been picked up, or set down, hurriedly so that some of the liquid came out of the spout. It had hardly got warm in the still-room, so there hadn’t been a fire. And—

  “I touched the can,” Weigand said. “Then I accidentally, more or less, smelled my hand, and it smelled funny for kerosene. Then we investigated.”

  “And it was—?” North said.

  Weigand nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “It wasn’t kerosene in the can. It was gasoline.”

  Mr. North drew in his breath, sharply, but Mrs. North looked puzzled.

  “You mean she was starting fires with gasoline?” she said. “But wouldn’t that be an awful risk? And wouldn’t she know if she made a hab—” Then Mrs. North drew in a breath.

  “But she didn’t,” Mrs. North said, quickly. “I know she didn’t, because just last week we were there for drinks in the evening and she was chilly—she got chilly awfully easy—and she built a fire and she said something about kerosene being the fire-maker’s friend and—”

  She looked at the men, wide-eyed.

  “Right,” Weigand said, and Heimrich said, slowly, “So—”

  “But you couldn’t use gasoline,” Mrs. North said. “Gasoline explodes.” She thought a moment. “But this didn’t explode,” she said. “The can was full, and if she poured it on the fire the fire would run up the stream and the can would blow up and—”

  She stopped, because Weigand was shaking his head at her, and then looking at Heimrich with some hidden meaning in his glance.

  “Exactly!” Weigand said. “That’s what people think.” He looked at Heimrich. “Just as I argued,” he said. Then he turned back to Mrs. North and explained. She was wrong about the way gasoline acted; most people were. Most people thought of it as an explosive, like dynamite. But it wasn’t. Most people thought that if you poured from a can onto a fire, or even onto embers, the stream from the can would ignite, fire would run up it and the can would explode.

  “But all that gasoline commonly does,” he said, “is to burn rapidly. You can get it to explode only under certain circumstances—roughly, when it is mixed with air in an inclosed space. Kerosene will explode under those conditions, too, but not so easily. If you want to and are careful, you can start fires with gasoline in reasonable safety. You can—and men on construction work frequently do—start fires with dynamite.

  “Not that I’d recommend it,” he added.

  But you couldn’t use gasoline in starting fires, or for any other purpose, precisely as you would use kerosene. “That’s the point just now,” Weigand said. You would have to take special precautions. You would have to be unusually careful.

  “But Jean always was,” Mrs. North said. “She poured kerosene on the logs and then carried the can back into the still-room where she kept it and shut the door—she always shut the door, but she carried the can away so it wouldn’t be near the fire.”

  Weigand nodded, slowly. He seemed satisfied, as if something had been reaffirmed. He said, “Right,” and then, after a moment, that that was the way he had figured it.

  “What would you do?” he asked the Norths. “If you were Jean building a fire—how would you go about it?”

  “Well,” North said, “I pile in some logs, smaller ones at the bottom. Then I pour on some kerosene. If there’s a fire there at all—or embers—it catches of itself in a minute or two with a kind of puff and spreads over the logs, which catch. That is, they usually catch. If there isn’t a fire, sometimes the kerosene sort of smokes and then I stand back and toss a match in the smoke and it puffs. That’s if the fireplace is still hot, I guess. If the fireplace is cold, I just hold a match to the kerosene and it catches, slowly.”

  Weigand said, “Right.

  “Now,” he said, “do you know what would happen if, instead of kerosene, you poured gasoline—about as much gasoline as you’d use kerosene; say you didn’t know the difference—on embers and—”

  “Smell,” said Mrs. North. Everybody looked at her inquiringly.

  “They smell different,” she said. “Don’t they? Wasn’t that the way you told?”

  Weigand nodded, and said they did.

  “But not much,” he said. “It’s not a difference you—well, remember. If you thought you were using kerosene and it was really gasoline your memory of the way kerosene smells wouldn’t hold over; you’d just accept the gasoline smell as a kerosene smell. Particularly if you had just got up and were a little fuzz
y, as most people are in the morning. Right?”

  Mrs. North said she supposed so.

  “Well,” Weigand said, “what would happen if you poured gasoline on embers?”

  “It wouldn’t explode?” Mrs. North asked, doubtfully. Weigand said it wouldn’t. “Then it would burn up suddenly?” Mrs. North said. Weigand shook his head, and said that was the funny part. Probably it wouldn’t.

  “Probably,” he said, “it would put the embers out.” The Norths looked at him, incredulous. “Just that,” he said. “The embers would turn black—probably nothing else would happen. But, unless you were trying to you probably wouldn’t hit all the embers directly; there would be coals smoldering on the bottom sides of logs, for example. If there were coals still smoldering, nothing would happen for a few seconds, while the gasoline vaporized—it vaporizes much more rapidly than kerosene—and got hot. There might be time enough, for example, to take the can back into the still-room at the Corbin cabin and put it down and come back and sit in front of the fire. Then—well, when it got hot enough, it would puff. It would be a puff almost like an explosion and—”

  “But that’s only what kerosene does,” Mrs. North objected.

  Weigand nodded.

  “It’s precisely what kerosene does, in theory,” he said. “But if you used as much gasoline as you would normally use kerosene, it wouldn’t be any little tame puff. It would come out in a sheet of fire, spread—well, feet into the room. And if you were sitting on a bench close to the fire, as Jean probably was—” He paused. “Well, you can see how it would be,” he said.

  Mrs. North drew a gasping breath.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh! Not like that!”

  “Yes,” Weigand said, and there was gentleness in his voice. “I’m afraid just like that. And if there weren’t embers to touch it off, and the fireplace was warm, the same thing would happen if you tossed a lighted match into the smoke. The fire would wrap itself around you, and if you were wearing, say, a light, fluffy polo coat over a nightgown—” He seemed to have finished, but after a moment he spoke again. “Well,” he said, “that was what Jean Corbin was wearing. And I think that was what happened. Heimrich isn’t so sure.”