Murder Out of Turn

by Frances Lockridge

  The Buick’s motor spoke angrily as, shifting down for greater speed, Weigand forced it up the hill. At the top there was a moment’s pause before the right jog became clear. And then, as they swung to the right, they were in time only to glimpse the twin tail-lights of a car which turned sharply down at the next corner, headed for Main Street. Weigand knew there was trouble ahead, and that there was trouble dropping recklessly down the almost perpendicular street toward Main, only after he had guided the Buick into Hospital Road. He went on, then, up the twisting road, with the motor shrill under the hood.

  It was half instinct which made Weigand, once he attained the maneuvering space offered by the hospital’s entrance plaza, swing the Buick in a circle, so that it headed out again. Then the car stopped and swayed on its springs as the handbrake went on and Weigand was out while it was still swaying. As he ran toward the hospital doors they parted violently, and a State trooper emerged as if propelled. A man in not very clean white clothes emerged after him.

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “Let’s have it!”

  The trooper had been running, and his reply was gasped.

  “Tried to get Blair!” he said. “Pillow—smothered. Ran around—car. There was a girl here!”

  “Girl?” Weigand snapped. “What girl?”

  The trooper shook his head.

  “Asking for Blair,” he said. “Just before the nurse screamed. Must have come out here about the time he ran around the building. Looks like he got her, too!”

  “Blair?” Weigand asked.

  It tumbled out. Somebody had tried to smother Blair with a pillow. Man or woman, the nurse didn’t know. He had got into the room, and out of it, by means of the fire-escape and the window. The information girl had heard the sound of a motor starting a few seconds after she had called for the porter, but before the porter—“that’s him,” the trooper said, pointing to the man in white—came. It was the information nurse who had told them about the girl who had, just as trouble broke loose, stepped out of the hospital.

  It clicked in Weigand’s mind. The car they had seen, moving fast, turning toward Main Street. He was running toward his own car, calling back over his shoulder—calling anxiously, because of an unreasoning fear.

  “The girl!” he shouted. “What did she have on?”

  The car was in motion before the answer, relayed out from the nurse at the information desk, came back. The trooper ran toward the car as it moved away.

  “Sort of a green dress!” he shouted. “Green dress!”

  Weigand heard, and the car leaped under them. It burst from Hospital Road into the street; its tires shrieked as it swung left, leaning on the outside springs. It went down the steep street toward Main and the siren howled a warning ahead. Then Weigand had, with everything seeming to hang on it, to play a hunch. The car he was after—if he was right in being after it—might as easily have turned either way. Weigand turned left, and the note of the siren lifted.

  The traffic light at the intersection of Route 22 and Main Street was red against them when the Norths came riotously down the hill toward Brewster. The brake pedal dropped under Mrs. North’s foot and the car swerved a little, with tire rubber wailing against the pavement. Mr. North caught himself with his left hand against the windshield and said, “Say!”

  “Light!” Mrs. North said. “Oh.”

  The “Oh” signalized Mrs. North’s realization, for not the first time, that a green arrow under the red light indicated approval of a right turn. Still moving faster than its driver realized, the Norths’ car swung wide into Main Street and Mr. North emitted a wordless shout. Mrs. North threw the wheel over hard and the car shivered convulsively. But the car coming down Main Street toward Route 22, and also swinging wide for a right-turn, did not falter. Fenders grazed and there was a clatter as rear bumpers jabbed together and apart.

  “Damn!” said Mrs. North. “Where does he—”

  “Him!” Mr. North shouted, shouting her down, and shouting grammar down. “He’s getting away!”

  Mr. North was leaning back over the seat, staring out through the little window in the rear.

  The car which had grazed them was completing its swing into 22, heading toward New York.

  “And somebody else!” Mr. North said. “A girl, I think.”

  Mrs. North acted. Her still moving car stopped in a lurch. It backed violently toward 22, swinging to face after the fleeing car. A car which had started around the curve behind the Norths’ scuttled profanely for safety. Mrs. North, in a state of magnificent concentration on other matters, paid no attention. Before her car had stopped backing, it was jammed ahead again. Mr. North thought in a fury, and yelled.

  His shout went off in her ear, and Mrs. North’s head swung to meet it. Her eyes were faintly glazed with purpose. Mr. North was forcing open the door beside him, struggling awkwardly with his left hand.

  “Weigand!” Mr. North said. “Guide!”

  He almost tumbled to the pavement, and slammed the door. Mrs. North was nodding inside, and the car was moving again.

  “Not too close!” Mr. North yelled. “Just keep him in sight!”

  Mrs. North was nodding again, and continued to nod as the car leaped forward. Mr. North stood for a moment, dazed by rapidity. He stood in the cone of light which poured from the bottom of the hanging traffic signal and splattered on the concrete in a wide puddle.

  Then he was waving his injured arm and the sling which held it as lights from a car racing down Main Street glared in his eyes. He heard the protest of tires on macadam; saw the approaching car slow lurchingly. It hesitated beside him and the rear door nearest snapped open. Mr. North dodged it and fell in.

  “Right!” Mr. North told Weigand, at the wheel. “Toward town. Pam’s after them!”

  Weigand said nothing, but the gears jerked the Buick into motion. Mullins, half turned in the seat beside the lieutenant, looked at Mr. North wonderingly.

  “Jeez!” said Mullins. “How’d you get here?”

  Detective Mullins’ mind pursued action at a dogtrot.

  “Pam doped it and we came,” Mr. North explained. “We hit the surface twice, I think, coming in from camp.”

  He paused to worry. He thought of Pam going riotously around curves, driving, at last, as fast as she had always wanted to drive. He shuddered and cursed his arm.

  “You’re sure we’re right?” Weigand asked over his shoulder, without turning.

  “Yes,” Mr. North said. “We both saw them—or I did, anyway.” It occurred to him that he had no idea what Pam had seen. “Is it Dorian, too?”

  “Yes,” said Weigand. The word came flat and hard from his lips, like a sliver of glass. And then, driving at better than sixty around the curves over a stretch of crowned black road, Weigand began to curse. The words seemed to be blown back by the motion of the car. Mr. North had never heard Weigand’s voice so hard, or his words so hard. They straightened out on concrete, and the speedometer needle jumped. Far ahead there were the twin tail-lights of a car, and they ought, Mr. North thought, to be coming nearer. But they kept their distance.

  “Pam is in front of those lights,” Mr. North thought, desperately. He shuddered at the thought, and leaned forward to look at the Buick’s speedometer. The needle was at seventy-five, and climbing. “Please, God,” Mr. North prayed, “slow her down!”

  It is three miles, more or a little less, from the traffic light in Brewster to the first fork off Route 22 toward New York. There 22, relapsing again into pock-marked macadam, swings to the left and uphill. That is the way Sunday motorists take for New York. But to the right, N.Y. 100 bears off, in shining new concrete, and that is the road of the experienced. The Buick topped the last hill before the fork and roared down it, the siren crying for a clear way through the narrow underpass below the New York Central’s tracks.

  They jogged through the underpass at better than forty, and eighty had been more safe a minute before. They had done the three miles in a little over two minutes. Ahead,
splitting the fork, were the twin tail-lights of a stopped car.

  “Pam!” Weigand said, before Mr. North could be sure. “Good girl!”

  The Buick shuddered to a stop beside the Norths’ car, but there was no more finality in its halt than in a bird’s when the bird banks for a moment against a puff of air. Weigand leaned from the window and Mr. North wrenched at the door.

  “Right!” Mrs. North said. “At any rate—the only lights I’ve seen. They’ve got to be the ones!”

  Mr. North was scrambling out, banging his injured arm.

  “With you!” he gasped to his wife. “They’ll go first.”

  They had already gone first, cutting in a half-turn and moving west on 100 as if some gigantic rubber band had snapped them into flight. Mr. North was back beside Mrs. North as their car began to back, and swing to follow.

  “Take it easier, Pam,” Mr. North pleaded. “You’ve done swell.” The tail-lights of Weigand’s Buick were points far up the road. “Let the cops do it, Pam,” Mr. North urged. “Umph!” Mr. North was flattened against the seat as the car started.

  Weigand, at the wheel of the charging Buick, was no longer swearing. The helpless rage which had prompted that had been submerged by a desperate hope. They were chasing tiny red lights through the night, on a frantic guess. There was nothing ahead—but there was something ahead! A point of light, tiny and red, flickered up the road.

  “There!” Mullins promised, and pointed. His pointing hand withdrew under his coat, and its fingers gripped the butt of his service gun.

  “No,” Weigand said. “Somebody else—or one’s out. There’ll have to be two lights.”

  But by then it was already apparent that the single light was not the one they chased. It grew closer rapidly; the driver of that car was not fleeing anything. The siren whined a warning and the car ahead swerved, bumping on the shoulder. The Buick went past a little coupe, and a white face peering from a window. Ahead, then, there were no lights at all. Then, beyond a hill, there was a white glare mounting, and again the siren challenged. The lights of the car coming toward them flared in their eyes, dropped as a dimmer switch was clicked. The siren whirred impatient thanks. Now there was really nothing ahead, except white road under the Buick’s questing lights.

  But the road was hilly, and looped over the country. You could see a mile ahead, perhaps, before a hill hid the road or a curve sent lights plunging momentarily against trees. There was only hope, and wild chances to be taken.

  It was safer to do what he was doing at night than in daylight, Weigand found himself thinking as they cut close in to the left side of the road around a curve. Approaching lights flared warning against the sky; against trees and bushes. Even around curves—

  They straightened out and swayed. Mullins twisted to look behind. They had gone more than a mile on a straightaway before he saw what he was looking for. Lights from the following car plunged around the curve.

  “The Norths are coming, Loot,” he said. “Coming like blazes.”

  Weigand nodded, his eyes searching the road. Far ahead two tiny red spots glimmered briefly and vanished. Weigand’s foot sank on the accelerator, until it met rubbery resistance. This model was supposed to do better than a hundred, and now was the time to find out. The speed increased slowly, and now the siren was still. There was only the high, shrill note of the motor, and the singing of the tires on pavement. The headlights ate into the darkness, which seemed to have grown lighter.

  “Moon, Loot,” Mullins said. His voice was snatched from his mouth, tossed On the torrent of air from the open window beside him. Mullins looked back over his shoulder. There was a big moon coming over a hill. Mullins thought it was mighty pretty.

  The headlights bounced on the blackness of tree-trunks and the car bumped against the brakes. Then it rolled free again, around a curve on the inside. Ahead the road was straight, and now there was no doubt of the two tail-lights ahead. They must be moving very fast, but the Buick was gaining—gaining a little, snatching fractions of miles, parts of seconds, out of the distance between.

  “That’s them, Loot,” Mullins promised.

  “Right!” Weigand said. “I think so.”

  The speedometer needle climbed again. Well, it would better eighty, anyway, Weigand thought. He would write a testimonial—if they came through. “Police Lieutenant William Weigand, forced to use the utmost speed in pursuing a desperate—” Hell! Pursuing a girl in a green dress; pursuing a dream he had never had before at better than eighty on a narrow road full of curves and hills; pursuing two tiny spots of red that dipped, now, out of sight over a hill; climbed into sight again beyond and now vanished utterly.

  They curved down a long hill toward a traffic blinker. Beyond the blinker, 100 became Pines Bridge Road, twisting on the lips of reservoirs, through soldierly woods of evergreen, planted by the distant city; green sentinels of the water supply. And nobody—nobody in the world, with the world after him—could go very fast on that road and keep the road. But maybe—

  The siren hurled its warning at a car which crept across the intersection ahead. The car jumped. The Buick thundered through. The pavement was older, here; the Buick chattered over it. And the curves were sharper.

  The moon looked into the Buick, and two faces peered ahead. They were both white, but all faces are white in moonlight. Mullins clutched the side of the door, as they went around another curve which would have forced him into Weigand.

  “There!” he shouted.

  The car ahead was losing speed. The tail-lights were closer, now. The Buick was losing speed, too, but not so much.

  It was somewhere along here this morning that a girl in a green dress had cried out “Curve!” Weigand thought—somewhere a little farther on. He had told her about policemen, then, and how protective policemen were; how everywhere one goes, there are policemen, actual or ideal, to stand on guard. He took a curve so fast that the car skidded a little on dry pavement. The fleeing red lights were much closer, now.

  They were not more than half a mile ahead on the next straightaway—the straightaway which ended, Weigand suddenly remembered, in the curve which had been the real curve of Dorian’s warning. The car ahead was plunging at it, and now the fan of its headlights on the road were clear, and the red lights seemed to leap nearer as the fleeing driver, with the lights of pursuit bright in his mirror, slowed for the curve. And then—

  There was a sudden flash of light within the car in front. It was on—off!

  “What the—?!” Mullins said. And then his voice went up, hoarsely. “Watch out!” he shouted. “Jeez!”

  The brakes of Weigand’s car closed on spinning brake-drums. The Buick checked dizzily, but neither Weigand nor Mullins had thought for their own peril.

  The car ahead lurched. It twisted as if for the curve, and then there was a roar of sound—of thin metal buckling, of tires dragging sideways on concrete, incongruously among them the sudden blare of the car’s horn. Then the car was reeling off the road to crash against safety cables strung tight at the road’s edge. It hung there for a moment and then, rather slowly as it seemed, toppled over. The lights of the Buick blazed on the car as Weigand skidded it to a stop.

  There was movement in the wrecked car, which lay on its right side. The door in front seemed to fall from its hinges and a man stood in the light, raising a hand to shield his face. Then, heavily, the man began to run.

  “Get him!” Weigand said. He and Mullins spilled from the car, Mullins with his gun out. Weigand heard it speak, but it was not speaking in his world. He ran toward the wreck and as he ran there was a sudden puff of fire on the ground beside it. The fire leaped, as he ran, to the side of the car—it was hungry, hurrying fire. Then, as he covered the last few feet, more lights swooped down on them, and he heard tires jamming to a stop on concrete. But that was not in his world, either.

  His world was hard, resisting. He tore at it with his hands, and felt blood on them from jagged metal. Then the twisted steering column wh
ich barred him from the motionless figure of Dorian Hunt came away in his hands. And then flames were hot on his back and side, and his hands were leaving dark splotches on the shoulders of a green dress. For a moment his world hung in flames and effort; then Dorian seemed light in his hands and there was a swishing sound somewhere. He lifted Dorian clear and had her in his arms and clear of the wreck, on which flames licked eagerly. Mr. North, a fire-extinguisher perilously in his sound arm, hugged against him, was playing a foamy stream on the flames, which turned on it resentfully and hissed and fell away.

  “Got him!” Mullins was yelling from a little way off, and there was a dark blur of Mullins in the moonlight and a darker blur at Mullins’ feet. “Leg!”

  Then Weigand was bending over Dorian Hunt, and half supporting her in his arms, and Mrs. North was kneeling on the other side, with fingers on Dorian’s wrist.

  “All right, Bill,” Pam North was saying. “She’s just knocked out, I think.”

  Then Dorian’s eyes were open and she was looking up at Weigand and saying, in a far-away voice,

  “Hello, policeman.”

  Then the eyes focused, suddenly.

  “Did you get him?” Dorian said. “Did you get him, Bill?”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Oh,” he said, remembering something a long way off. “Yes, we got him. We got Saunders for you.”

  The eyes looking up at him seemed to change.

  “For me?” Dorian said, but she said it softly, with a kind of tenderness and a kind of amusement. “Thank you, Bill. It—well, I see what you mean about policemen, Bill.” Then her eyes closed, and there was a kind of, inertness in the body he held. Weigand looked at Mrs. North, with a desperate question in his eyes. But Mrs. North smiled.