Murder Out of Turn

by Frances Lockridge

  Dorian Hunt had opportunity, like the rest. It was difficult to think that any woman could have been Blair’s assailant, but not impossible. The women were dressed as efficiently as the men at the lake; one of them armed with, say a tire iron—

  “Was that what they used?” Mullins asked.

  Weigand admitted that they didn’t know, except that it was something made of iron, and in the shape of a bar. There had been rust particles in Blair’s wound. A tire iron would serve, for the argument; a woman might use it, although it was not characteristic, admittedly. But, neither was murder.

  And Dorian Hunt might have motive. It was not clear, reasonable motive like Blair’s. It argued emotional instability of some sort—“as what murder doesn’t?” Weigand interrupted himself. It argued a period of brooding over Clayton Hunt’s trial and imprisonment, and a fixation of blame on Helen Wilson. But both these things were entirely possible.

  “She’s high strung, at any rate,” Weigand said. “She has a good deal of what you might call emotional intensity. I’ll admit she seems, at bottom, balanced enough. But I’ll also admit I’m no psychiatrist.”

  “It could be,” Mullins said. “We’ve known it to happen that way.”

  They had, Weigand agreed. It was unusual, but not unheard-of. But then, anything was unusual as a motive, except money and, in one of its forms, jealousy. They seemed to rule the murderer’s roost.

  “Anybody else for Wilson?” Mullins said, to start things again. Weigand did not answer immediately, because the light ahead turned red. The speed of the car checked; then the Buick rolled free again as the brakes were released. The lonely, angry cry of the siren rose from the car hood’s interior, and Mullins jumped involuntarily. Then he looked curiously at Weigand, as the car, dodging a quickly halted bus, rolled on and picked up speed.

  “We’re in a hurry, huh?” he said.

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “We’re sort of in a hurry.”

  He was glad that Mullins did not ask why. Weigand was not sure he knew why. But there was something in his mind commanding speed; ordering that obstacles to speed be brushed aside.

  “Yes,” said Weigand. “That seems to be all for Helen. So we make our next supposition—that she was killed because she knew something about the plan to kill Jean Corbin. And that, I think, begins to fit in.”

  It fitted in only as he talked, and remembered—that was one of the advantages of talking it out. Helen Wilson had left the North cabin Saturday afternoon to go to the store—and to go to Jean Corbin’s cabin to leave something. A tennis shirt, or something, Weigand remembered. And there you had the likeliest time for her to stumble onto something—onto, why, of course, the murderer switching the cans! Or, probably, getting ready to switch the cans, and being in the cabin with his presence unexplained.

  “Sure enough,” Mullins said. He looked at the lieutenant admiringly. “And,” he said, “that pins down the time the murderer set the trap.”

  It did. He had set the trap then—well, sometime between, say, four-thirty and five, or five and five-thirty, or any half-hour period within those times, on Saturday afternoon. And Helen Wilson had stumbled onto him and—

  “He probably gave some excuse,” Weigand said. “Something that sounded reasonable enough at the time, but would sound mighty thin to Helen when Jean was killed; something she would remember, then, and tell. So, instead of calling the whole thing off, which would have been the other alternative, he let it go ahead, but killed Helen so that she could never tell of having seen him there. And that—”

  Weigand paused, thinking. The car hesitated at Hawthorne circle, shot around the curve with the tires protesting, and straightened out on the Bronx River Extension. There was the sudden splatter of a motorcycle engine behind. Weigand didn’t look back. Instead, the siren on the Buick spoke gently, in remonstrance. The motorcycle came alongside and the policeman on it took a look. The siren murmured again, and Weigand nodded to the motorcycle man. The motorcycle dropped back.

  “—and that,” Weigand said, “tells us another thing. For some reason, it was important that the murder occur that day. It couldn’t be postponed.”

  He paused, conscious of insecurity in that statement, and waited for Mullins.

  “Yeh,” Mullins said. But he said it doubtfully. “Only—”

  “Yes?” Weigand encouraged.

  “Well, Loot,” Mullins said. “It looks to me like that doesn’t have to be so. Say she saw somebody in the cabin who wouldn’t normally be there, because if she didn’t she wouldn’t think anything about it, see?”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Well, then,” Mullins said. “Wouldn’t she maybe remember having seen this guy—or this dame, whichever it was—after the Corbin girl got bumped, no matter when the Corbin girl got bumped? Even if he called off the killing then, and did it later, wouldn’t she get to thinking about it, and remember that it had looked sorta funny for this guy to be around that afternoon and then, maybe—”

  Mullins stopped, entangled in prose, but pretty certain that Weigand would get him. Weigand got him, it appeared. Weigand nodded doubtfully, and then more confidently and, Mullins decided, in approval.

  “Right,” Weigand said, finally. “We’ll leave that open. But we’ll suppose that Helen was killed because she saw something that afternoon. Right?”

  “Yeh,” Mullins said. “I guess that’s right, all right.”

  So then they looked for suspects of the murder of Jean Corbin, taking it as the essential murder. They looked for suspects, and found plenty.

  There was Blair, again—jealousy, this time, on the assumption that Jean was easing him off for Professor James Harlan Abel. And Abel, on the same assumption, because—

  “Listen, Loot,” Mullins, encouraged by his success, cut in. “This girl Jean was a good-looker, wasn’t she? Something you’d expect a guy to go for, even a professor? So why would he be bumping her off?”

  Weigand shook his head, this time. You had to see Abel differently, he thought. You had to see him as a self-centered man, narrowly, intensely, living life as he planned it, and ruthlessly eliminating invasions. You could add to that the fact that, as a faculty member, his position might be imperiled if it came out that he, married, was in a close association with a much younger woman who had, moreover, formerly been a student of his. Then, to these, you could add a certain coldness, a rather singular detachment, you felt in the man. When you added them together the sum was—possible suspect.

  “Yeh?” said Mullins, doubtfully. Weigand nodded, decisively. “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said, bowing to superior insight.

  You had, also, Saunders, who had once also been a very intimate associate of Jean’s, who had left the advertising agency, as a result of Jean’s machinations. You might assume that he had found out that Jean Corbin was lunching with Fillmore that day—Monday—and that her purpose was to get the Quench account back, as apparently it was. So there you had a combination of growing anger over a period of years, jealousy perhaps, and immediate need to intervene.

  “Yeh,” Mullins said. “That’s a good, solid one, all right.”

  It might be, Weigand admitted. But it was no solider than Blair’s for killing Helen Wilson—not as solid, really. It might very well be feebler, counting personalities, than Abel’s or, to bring in another, Mrs. Abel’s. There you had good, straightforward jealousy and, moreover, a personality which fitted better than Saunders’.

  “Saunders is one of these hearty guys,” Weigand explained. Mullins nodded.

  “Of course,” he said, “sometimes it is the hearty guys.”

  “Sometimes,” said Weigand, “it’s almost anybody. But the hearty guys are pretty well down.”

  Weigand drove for a good many minutes before he said anything more. He turned from the Bronx River Extension onto Route 100, branched from it to the tortuous wanderings of the Pines Bridge Road along the reservoirs. He was making good time, the car clock told him—only a little more than an hour to Pines Bridge
. The twisting of the road slowed him, somewhat. It was, Mullins said after a long time, a screwy road.

  Weigand’s thoughts, he discovered, had switched from the issue at hand. He was remembering the drive in that morning with Dorian—along here, somewhere, he had been arguing with her about policemen. A little farther along she had startled him, and very possibly saved them from a bad smash, by warning him of the curve—the first of the “curves”; the one that was there. He found himself watching for the curve, where they had for an instant shared alarm; where, for the split part of a second, their lives had been cupped together in a moment of danger, which had passed almost before it could be realized. He saw several curves which might be it, and then one he knew was.

  It might, he saw, as they went around it in the reverse direction, have been a very nasty smash, although probably not a fatal one. The main road, in the direction they had been going, turned at right angles to the left, and another road—apparently little used—came in at the right. In the “Y” there was a triangle of rough, but reasonably solid, gravel. You might skid in that gravel and come out all right; you might skid through it and pile up against the bank beyond. It was hard to tell what a car would do—you might even miss the bank and slide farther right, where it shelved away into a fairly deep ditch. That would be the big danger, of course. You—

  But the point was, of course, that they had done nothing of the kind, but merely slowed decorously and rounded the curve safely. Thanks to her cry. So it had, in fact, been nothing at all. He wrenched his mind away from it, and from Dorian. When he began to speak again, it was of Thelma Smith. It was hard to make Mullins understand Thelma Smith—the excited bitterness she had showed against Jean Corbin, the string of grievances which had poured so angrily from her; the mingling of hate and love that you could, if you wanted, read into her outburst.

  “Well,” Mullins said, “she sure sounds like quite a dame.” He thought a moment. “It looks to me, Loot,” he said, “like she’s the one we’re after.”

  It could be, Weigand said. Or, by some stretch of the imagination, and a willingness to assume there was more to know than they knew, Bram Van Horst. Or even, assuming there was everything still to know, the fat menace of old Marvin, who sold wood but no kindling, and indignantly mowed for a man whose character he blackened with evident glee. But Weigand added these last names idly.

  He completed the last turn of the Pines Bridge Road impatiently, and the car’s speed picked up on the hilly straightaway to Somers. Mullins was puzzled again by their speed. He had never known the Loot to drive so fast, except when there was a reason for fast driving clearly in sight. And Weigand, even as he pressed harder on the accelerator pedal, was puzzled to account for the nagging insistence of that something in his mind which kept saying, “Faster! Faster!”

  And then the nagging, after Somers was past, and after they were on Route 22, and through Brewster on the last stretch to Lone Lake, changed somewhat in character. It was a kind of buzzing in the back of his mind; it felt like something asking to be known, or remembered. It grew louder as the car raced for the turnoff, and then, when they were on the hill above Ireland’s store, something clicked. Weigand thought that it must have clicked loudly enough for Mullins to hear it, but Mullins gave no sign. Mullins was merely looking around at the countryside, over which the shadows of trees were lengthening.

  He did not seem to notice that, just before he swung the Buick through the gap in the wall which was the Norths’ driveway, Weigand began to nod slowly to himself, and that his eyebrows drew together a little, until there was a line between them. If he had noticed these things, Mullins would have felt less perplexed, but Mullins was thinking about the chance for an old-fashioned, or two old-fashioneds from the Norths. Mullins’ own brow cleared when he decided that the chances were good.

  16

  MONDAY

  7:10 P.M. TO 8:43 P.M.

  Lieutenant Weigand pulled the Buick up beside the Norths’ car on the lawn and stepped from it with an odd urgency still driving him; stepped from it expectantly, with an inner readiness for emergency. Curiously, he felt himself braced against an onslaught, against an instant demand for the full employment of his faculties. And nothing could have been more disconcerting than the peace which closed in around him—the peace of a crisp, early fall evening in the country, with light slanting from the west now across the lake, with smoke rising unhurriedly from the chimney of the Norths’ cabin, with that tiny, restful whir of evening noises in the air. It did not even seem to be a lull before a storm; the atmosphere was innocent of premonition.

  And as he stood for a moment, startled and oddly disappointed by this, the feeling of urgency left him. He experienced a sensation of being overprepared—of being ready for more life than there seemed to be. He found himself obscurely dynamic in a static world, and felt a little foolish. And afterward, when the matter of the murders at Lone Lake had been resolved, Weigand was apt to cite that feeling as an example of how, sometimes, hunches will leave one in the lurch just when they are most needed. There was never, he would tell the Norths, recalling that moment, a time when the need for instant action was more imperative or when the direction of that action was, in reality, more clearly apparent. But the hunch which might have supplied the voltage of action died suddenly away.

  It had died and left only a ghost. The ghost accompanied Weigand as, with Mullins beside him, he walked toward the cabin. But Pete, emerging to observe arrival, apparently did not see the ghost. Pete rolled over and presented a white belly, inviting attention from two accepted friends. Lieutenant Heimrich opened the screen door of the North cabin and emerged, but did not present his belly. He looked at the arrivals gloomily, and accepted abstractedly an introduction to Detective Mullins.

  “Well?” Weigand said.

  “Nothing,” Heimrich said. “Except that these lead soldiers I’ve got working for me let virtually everybody get away. The Hunt girl, Abel, Kennedy—even the Smith girl. They all just walked away, or rode away, or something.” Heimrich snorted. “And now this Saunders guy, after staying around all day like a little man, has wandered off somewhere,” he continued, “and would any of my mounted policemen have noticed it?” The question was disgustedly rhetorical.

  “I’ll tell you, Weigand,” he continued, riding his grievance, “the State Police fell apart when they quit using horses. With a trooper on a horse you could be sure, anyway, that the horse would have some sense. And now what have you got? Just a trooper on a motorcycle!”

  Weigand was careful not to agree with him, suspecting that Heimrich, in his present mood, would grow apoplectic in the face of agreement. Heimrich would, Weigand thought, explode in defense of the troopers at the faintest echo from without of this angry grumble from within. Just as I, Weigand thought, probably would defend Mullins. He watched Mullins fading, as well as his bulk permitted, into an obscurity from which he could escape to the Norths and their presumptive rye.

  “It’s a hard place to watch,” Weigand said, mildly. “Probably there’s no harm done, in any case.”

  “Well—” said Heimrich. “It’s a hell of a note, just the same. Did you work out anything in town?”

  A few things, Weigand told him. Mullins disappeared within the cabin, and Mrs. North’s voice was raised in greeting, as Weigand tersely recapitulated his day. He told of Jean Corbin’s luncheon engagement, of Abel’s telephone call and of the interview with Abel’s secretary, of the substantiation of Mrs. Wilson’s account of the expected inheritance. He sketched, lightly, his interview in the district attorney’s office and said he had visited the apartments of both the murdered girls.

  “Find anything?” Heimrich said.

  “Well, no …” Weigand hesitated. “Nothing that seems to bear, anyway. I think, in fact, that we—”

  He left the sentence in the air. Heimrich looked at him, studied his face.

  “Come on,” he said. “Out with it!”

  Weigand shook his head.

 
; “I may be onto something,” he said. “That’s true. It’s as little a thing as you could imagine—maybe it means a lot, maybe it means nothing.”

  Heimrich told him not to be mysterious. Weigand shook his head.

  “It’s just something floating now,” he said. “If I can tie it down, it’s yours. Meanwhile, it’s just a hunch.”

  “Oh,” said Heimrich. “A hunch! I thought maybe you had something.”

  “No,” Weigand said. “Just a hunch. Have you picked up anything?”

  Heimrich nodded and said that, as a matter of fact, they had picked up one or two things. A technician had been called in to check the Corbin cabin and was preparing findings. After he had finished, a couple of troopers had proved that there was no body under the cabin floor. Heimrich looked a little sheepish as he reported this, but Weigand only nodded.

  “And we found a boy with a piece of tubing,” Heimrich added. Weigand’s eyebrows went up. Heimrich said that he thought it hooked up, all right, but not that it got them anywhere.

  Figuring that a tube of some sort might have been used to siphon gasoline from the tank of a car, which might have no drainage valve, to a can, Heimrich had sent troopers to likely places on a hunt. They had found a length of tubing in Van Horst’s barn, but it had no odor of gasoline. On the other hand, Van Horst, shown the find, looked puzzled and said he thought he had had a longer piece. And then a trooper, checking the cabins on the far side of the lake, had seen two small boys playing on the shore with something and dropped over to investigate.

  “On a hunch,” Weigand pointed out, with a faint smile. Heimrich, following his line of thought, nodded.

  What the boys had been playing with was a six-foot, more or less, length of rubber tubing. They had been busily filling it with lake water and emptying it again, apparently over each other, but there was still detectable a faint odor of gasoline.

  The boys had advanced several theories to account for their possession, but had finally settled for what appeared to be the truth—that they had found it. They took the trooper who questioned them and showed him where they found it.