Murder Out of Turn

by Frances Lockridge

  They looked at Heimrich, who was slowly nodding his head.

  “It might have been that way,” he said. “It’s a reconstruction. And if it was that way?”

  “You see it,” Weigand said. “It was an accident—somehow she got gasoline instead of kerosene—or somebody planned it. And we’ve had a killing already.”

  “So,” Heimrich said. “Yes, I think so. I wanted to hear you prove it.”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “I knew that was the idea. Now let’s see if the Norths know anything about the can.”

  Heimrich yelled, suddenly, “Pete!” Everybody looked at him in astonishment, including Pete. Pete looked a little hurt and went over to this strange, odd-smelling man who suddenly called his name. Heimrich looked at Pete in mild surprise. A trooper stuck his head in the door and said, “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Get the can, Pete,” the lieutenant said, and everybody subsided, except the feline Pete, who looked more puzzled than ever. Heimrich looked a little puzzled, too.

  “It’s his name, too,” Mrs. North explained, pointing. Heimrich laughed, suddenly. Trooper Pete came to the door carrying a can.

  “Hey,” Lieutenant Heimrich said, “you’re named after a cat, trooper.” The trooper looked startled, and went away when Heimrich waved. They looked at the can.

  “Ever see it before?” Weigand said. The Norths looked at it again.

  “Is that the one?” Mrs. North said, and then said, “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?” Weigand asked. Mrs. North pointed to a splash of paint on the top of the can.

  “That,” she said, “I remember noticing it last week. When Jean was making the fire.”

  “Good girl,” Weigand said. “I hoped somebody might.”

  “It would have been better,” Heimrich pointed out, “if she remembered seeing it somewhere else. That would get us somewhere.”

  That, Weigand agreed, would have been very nice. “But too much to hope,” he added, and Heimrich nodded and said, “Oh, yes.”

  “But look,” Mrs. North said. “You mean somebody poured the kerosene out of the can and put in gasoline, knowing it would puff out and burn Jean to death? You mean there’s anybody like that—?” She drew closer to her husband, who put an arm around her. “And right after Helen,” Mrs. North went on. She started and sat straight. “You think she could have known who killed Helen and had to be—got out of the way?” she said.

  There was a little pause, broken by Heimrich.

  “That’s the way it looks,” he said. “It’s a hell of a thing.”

  Weigand hesitated a moment longer.

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s the way it looks. But it doesn’t follow that the murderer thought she would burn to death.” They looked at him.

  “He might, you see, have thought the can would explode while she was holding it,” he said. “As you two did. And then she might have died quickly. And then the can would have been gone, and the gasoline, and we would have had mighty little to go on.”

  Heimrich nodded.

  “We haven’t too much as it is,” he said, “but that would have made it harder. It would have been hard to prove it wasn’t some sort of a funny accident. This way—” he paused.

  “Well,” he said, “this way we can be pretty sure that the same guy got her as got Helen Wilson. We can be pretty sure that she saw something that it wasn’t healthy to see and—” But he saw Weigand shaking his head and stopped.

  “You could be jumping,” he said. He smiled, rather grimly. “Maybe,” he said, “somebody just jammed into line out of turn. It could be that way, too.”

  6

  SUNDAY

  11 A.M. TO 11:45 A.M.

  Lieutenant Heimrich got up and began to walk back and forth across the room. He walked heavily, with a kind of hard, almost angry, determination. The Norths and Weigand watched him and after a while Weigand spoke. His tone was sympathetic.

  “It makes a nice one, doesn’t it, Heimrich?” he said. “It all adds up to a straw-stack with a couple of needles in it.”

  Heimrich said, “Yeh.” Then he stopped and stared at Weigand. He looked at him for almost a minute, which is a long time to be looked at.

  “Yes?” Weigand said. He said it suspiciously.

  “I was just thinking,” Heimrich said. “You sound as if you were leaving it in my lap, just like that. You weren’t planning to be going anywhere, were you?”

  “Now, listen,” Weigand said. “I’m on vacation. I’m a city cop. Why should I be taking on this county’s headaches? I stopped here for the weekend, planning to drive on into New England and look at trees. Just look at trees; standing around, changing color, not getting into anything. So tomorrow I’m going on and look at some trees.”

  Heimrich looked at him and said, “Yeah?”

  “Damn it all,” said Weigand. His voice was, for him, a little blustery, and a smile began to form on Mrs. North’s lips. Weigand saw the smile. “Damn it all,” he said, more firmly than ever. “Do I ask the State cops to give me a hand in town? Do I?”

  Heimrich caught Mrs. North’s smile too. She was suddenly conscious that Lieutenant Heimrich was not a man you could count out in such matters. Weigand looked at the two of them.

  “Sure you don’t,” Heimrich said. “Only did I ever find a body in your town? Was I ever all tied up in it? Was I ever—well, say, a material witness? But who said you had to do anything?”

  Weigand looked at the three of them, and he tried to look angry. But he knew, as he had known for some time, that he wasn’t going on into New England, trees or no trees.

  “Truck-driver’s,” said Mrs. North, unexpectedly.

  Heimrich looked at her, baffled. Weigand and Mr. North looked at each other and then Mr. North said, “Oh, yes.

  “Bus,” he said. “For ‘truck’ read ‘bus.’”

  Mrs. North looked at them both and said she was getting sort of tired of them doing that. But she did not speak as if she were really getting sort of tired of it.

  “Anyway,” she said, “that’s the kind of holiday you’ve worked up for yourself, Mr. Weigand.”

  Weigand raised both hands a few inches and shrugged, the palms open.

  “Right,” he said. “I wouldn’t buck the law. But it’s your case, all the same.”

  “I wasn’t giving you the case,” Heimrich said. “So. A little cooperation?”

  Weigand nodded. All at once he found he was thinking of Dorian Hunt, and of how lightly she moved. Even with murders, Lone Lake had its points. He looked at the Norths, and asked if they didn’t have to get back to town.

  “No,” Mr. North said. “We were staying through the week, anyhow. A last fling at summer; that sort of thing. So that’s all right.”

  Heimrich walked a minute or two longer, and then he sat down, heavily. But there was, Mrs. North thought, nothing really heavy about his eyes.

  “So,” he said. “That’s fixed. Now where are we?”

  Weigand said that where they were was in a mess. At the start of a mess. They had two murders, for all practical purposes simultaneously. They had one method and—“Have we got a medical on Wilson?” he said. Heimrich yelled for Pete, and the cat looked at him disgustedly and did nothing. Trooper Pete appeared.

  “Get in touch with the medical examiner’s office,” Heimrich directed, “and ask them where the hell’s the medical on Wilson.”

  “It’s right here,” Pete said. “They just sent it. I was just coming along with it.”

  They took the report and spread it out on the table, Weigand and Heimrich studying it. Mrs. North started to look over Weigand’s shoulder, and then decided not to. It was not a long report. Helen Wilson had been about twenty-six, white and female. She had died from a stab wound in the throat, made by a heavy, not very sharp weapon which had torn as much as cut, and severed an artery. She had lost consciousness almost at once and died within a few minutes. When her body was examined—at around 2 A.M.—she had been dead between
two and four hours. Making allowances for the coolness of the night and other external conditions, the physician who had performed the autopsy was willing to guess that she had died around eleven o’clock.

  Weigand and Heimrich looked at each other. Weigand shook his head.

  “As I told you earlier,” he said, “I wasn’t noticing. I thought I was on vacation. She was at the party for a while and then I noticed that she had gone, but I can’t guess about times. Not for her or for anyone. Maybe the Norths?”

  The Norths looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “I remember talking to her a while after we got there,” Mrs. North said. “And seeing her dancing a little later. But I wasn’t thinking about times.”

  Weigand looked at Mr. North and Mr. North shook his head.

  “So,” said Heimrich. “Suppose we say that the Doc is right. Call it eleven o’clock. Where was the Corbin girl then, does anybody know?”

  Nobody did. She had been with Weigand for about half an hour, he guessed, before he walked back with her to her cabin. Say he could account for her from 12:30 on. Before that he’d seen her once or twice, but couldn’t say when.

  “And she didn’t act as if she knew anything then, obviously,” Heimrich said. “Or you’d have said so.”

  “As far as I know she acted normally,” Weigand said. “I didn’t have much chance to know what normal was for her, of course. But I’d be pretty sure she hadn’t witnessed a murder.”

  “But—” Heimrich began.

  Weigand said, “Right. She didn’t need to see it, I agree. She might have seen something else that meant nothing at the time, but might have meant a lot after Helen’s body was found. Somebody carrying something, perhaps. The weapon—what the hell was the weapon?”

  All four of them shook their heads, the Norths in sympathy with the detectives.

  “So—” said Heimrich, after a pause. “It leaves things open. The Corbin girl may have seen something which made her dangerous to the man who killed Wilson, if it was a man. And then while the party was going on he may have sneaked out, substituted gasoline for kerosene, and waited for things to happen. As they did. So if we find out who killed Helen Wilson, and why, we’ll know who killed Jean Corbin.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “And go on.”

  Heimrich looked at him, inquiringly. Weigand said there was no good his pretending he didn’t see the rest of it. That it worked the other way, just as well.

  “We don’t know when the gasoline was substituted,” he said. “It might have been almost any time yesterday. Helen Wilson may have stumbled on something about the substitution which would be dangerous to the murderer after the Corbin girl was dead and Helen began remembering. So the murderer may have persuaded her to leave the party and then killed her so she couldn’t talk later. In that case, if we find out who killed Jean Corbin, we’ll know who killed Helen Wilson.”

  “That,” Heimrich said, “certainly tangles it up nice.”

  “But listen—” said Mrs. North, out of the ensuing pause. “It could have been both—together, I mean. It doesn’t have to be first one and then the other.”

  “But it was first one and then the other,” Heimrich said. “It was first Helen Wilson between ten and midnight and then Jean Corbin a little after eight. So—” His voice trailed off, as a thought struck him. He looked at Mrs. North with something approaching animus.

  “Yes,” said Weigand, “she would bring that up. But we’ve got to consider it. There may have been one motive covering both girls, so that the order of the murders doesn’t mean a thing. Maybe neither was killed because she knew something about the murder of the other, but because the murderer had a motive to kill both.”

  “That helps,” Heimrich said, and got up and began to walk the floor again. “And there may have been two murderers. And the Corbin girl’s death may have been an accident we haven’t doped out. The whole damn thing may be a coincidence. That certainly helps.”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “we don’t have to take on all the possibilities at once. That’s something. And I doubt whether accident or coincidence come into it. It doesn’t look that way now, anyway.”

  “Yeh,” Heimrich said. “And we’d better get at it. We’ve got to find the weapon that killed Wilson. Maybe we can trace the gasoline in the Corbin oil-can. Maybe somebody bought it.”

  “It’s more likely somebody siphoned it out of a car,” Weigand pointed out. Heimrich said sure it was, but they’d have to check.

  “I’ve got men dragging the lake, of course,” he said. “I’ll get men checking on sales of gasoline and—” He broke off, considering. Then he shook his head. “I was wondering if we could check car tanks, someway,” he said. “Find out when the tanks of the various cars were filled last, how far the cars have been driven, what they burn per mile and how much is left. But that would just drive us crazy—nobody’d know whether their last purchase filled their tank, or where they’d been since. We’ll have to get it some other way. Maybe somebody did just walk into a filling station with a two-gallon can and have it filled up.”

  Weigand and Heimrich looked at each other. Neither looked hopeful.

  “Prints we’re getting from the Corbin can,” Heimrich went on, “and we’ll pick up prints around camp.” He thought. “Do you think of anything else?” he asked Weigand.

  Weigand thought of two points and ticked them off. One, find out whether anybody at Lone Lake had recently bought a new, two-gallon kerosene can. Two, find out who had bought kerosene the day before. “At Ireland’s?” he questioned the Norths. They nodded.

  “Everybody does,” Mrs. North said. “He keeps it in a lean-to, locked up. We bought some yesterday. Why?”

  Weigand said that knowing might come in useful.

  “But why the new can?” North asked, and Heimrich looked interested, too. Weigand said that somebody had to have an extra can, obviously, and if he didn’t already have a spare he’d have to get one.

  “Any other course would be too risky,” Weigand added.

  North and Heimrich looked at each other, now. “Cryptic, that’s what these people are,” North said. “Comes from associating with my wife. Maybe I’d better look into it?”

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “I don’t get it. Somebody took a can of gasoline to the Corbin cabin, poured it into the can there, took it away again. Where’s your third can?”

  “Wait a minute!” Mrs. North said. “I’m getting it, sort of. Was there kerosene already in her can?”

  That, Weigand said, was precisely what they had to consider. Possibly they could find out, someway. No—wait a minute.

  “We know there must have been some kerosene in the can,” he said, “because she used it. That is—she thought she was using it. If the can had been empty she would never have tried to pour from it to start the fire. And—this isn’t so certain—it probably was full during the day, before the murderer made the switch, because it’s full now. If it were only half-full when the switch was made it would be only half-full now, unless the murderer was pretty dim-witted.”

  “Why?” said Mr. North, dimly.

  “So it would weigh approximately what she expected when she picked it up,” Weigand pointed out. “She might not have noticed the difference, but the chances are at least even she would have, and anybody thinking about it would know that. He’d want to have the same weight of gasoline she would expect of kerosene. Right?”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. North. “Anybody could see that.” She looked at Mr. North pityingly.

  “And,” she said, “if the can was full when he—the murderer, I mean—got there he’d have to have three cans. Or something else. To pour into.”

  “Look,” said Mr. North, “you’ve got me all mixed up. Do you see it, Heimrich?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “They’ve got something there.”

  Mrs. North said that Jerry wasn’t being as bright as she’d hoped and it made one wonder.

  “A fool’s paradi
se,” she said. “That’s where I’ve been living. Look—”

  You went with a full can of gasoline, holding two gallons, to substitute it for kerosene in another can which, as they had demonstrated, was almost certainly full or nearly full. You couldn’t merely switch the cans, because one could be identified. So you had to have a third can, or some other receptacle, to pour the kerosene into while—

  “Oh, of course,” said Mr. North. “Only why not just pour it out? Or why not just use a pan from the kitchen?”

  “Well—” said Mrs. North and looked doubtful for a moment. “You tell him, Bill,” she said.

  “Take the last possibility first,” Weigand suggested. “It would smell up the pan. She might use the pan for cooking, or start to, before she used the gasoline. It might make her suspicious. Throwing it away has several disadvantages from the murderer’s viewpoint, depending on where he threw it. If he poured it down the sink in the kitchen, it would smell. If he poured it near the house it would smell. But if he went around looking for a secluded place far enough away, he would increase the chances of being noticed—and being noticed while doing something odd. If he poured it nearby, taking a chance on the odor it would—”

  “Leave a mark,” Mrs. North said. “Kill the grass.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “If he carried it down to the lake and poured it in, it would leave an oil scum,” he said. “And why do any of these things? Why not just take it home in his own can and use it up?”

  “Well—” said Mr. North, “that sounds sensible.”

  Heimrich nodded.

  “So—” he said. “It’s worth playing it that way until we find out different. So we’ll check on cans and kerosene too. Meanwhile, we’d better ask some questions.”

  They asked their questions, and were at it until well into the evening, with one or two interruptions. And afterward Weigand and Heimrich agreed they hadn’t been very bright about it, because at least once they had had their fingers on something and let it get away. They had an ugly reason to be sure of that, as it turned out, because the murderer they were after saw what they failed to see and acted, quickly and ruthlessly, on what he saw.