Death of an Angel

by Frances Lockridge

  “Of course,” Pam said, “life has to go on. One has to eat.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “And—speaking of that. I’ve still got Braithwaite. If you’re—?”

  Pam was. Jerry delayed matters somewhat, multiplying in quest of a percentage. He wrote the figure in, and looked at it doubtfully. Why he always found it so difficult to figure tips he would, he supposed, never know. He shuddered slightly, and pushed the signed check away from him.

  “Maybe,” Pam said, “you can call it entertainment.” She stood up and led the way, so that they passed in front of Miss Naomi Shaw, radiant—but not at the moment appreciably radiant—star of Around the Corner and of Mr. Wesley Strothers, its producer. Pam smiled at them, and nodded, but did both with detachment. Naomi Shaw smiled in return, equally without certainty, but by then Jerry had overtaken Pam.

  “Evening, Mrs. West,” Strothers said. “Hello, West.”

  They did not argue, but went on. At the door, however, Pam turned and looked back at the two. It appeared that Strothers was doing most of the talking. Naomi Shaw was, apparently, a girl men talked to when they took her out.

  “Mr. Strothers has compass trouble,” Jerry said, and took Pam by the elbow and through the lobby and into Forty-fourth Street. “Yes, if you will,” the last was to the doorman, who offered a cab. But Pam said, “Wait, Jerry. Look!” Jerry looked, as Pam was looking, up Forty-fourth toward Fifth. “The man snapping his fingers,” Pam said. “Who else could it be?”

  The man, who was narrow, upon whom, seen even from a distance, clothes seemed to hang limply, was passing the Harvard Club. As he walked, he snapped his fingers. As they watched, he stopped, and went to the curb, and looked toward them down Forty-fourth Street, in an unmistakable attitude of a man in search of a cab. He went on again.

  “Do you see his tail?” Pam asked.

  The doorman looked at her. His mouth opened slowly.

  Between them and Samuel Wyatt there was only a couple, but the couple walked toward the Norths. Jerry looked toward Sixth Avenue. Two tall and hatless young men were approaching. Clearly, Jerry thought, en route to the Harvard Club bar.

  “No tail,” Jerry said.

  The doorman blinked his eyes. He left his mouth open.

  “Then come on,” Pam said, and started on. Jerry overtook her. He said, “Now listen, Pam.”

  “Slower,” Pam said. “We mustn’t gain on him. You know that’s not the way.”

  “I know nothing about it,” Jerry said, but slowed his pace to Pam’s, to the receding Samuel Wyatt’s. “I’m not a tail. I have no ambition to be—”

  “Only until we can get in touch with Bill,” Pam said. “It’s just a—an emergency. We can’t just stand here and let him go. You know that. Only until he holes up. As substitutes.”

  Jerry ran a hand through his hair. But they followed Wyatt. Pinch-hitting for tails, Jerry thought morosely, and hoped that Wyatt soon would hole.

  But he showed no inclination to do this. He had, it appeared, abandoned his search for a cab, since he no longer looked back. He reached Fifth, found the lights with him, and crossed. The Norths reached Fifth and found the lights against them. “We can’t just stand here,” Pam said, and did not. Jerry caught up with her in midstream.

  “You’ll get us both killed,” he said, but the protest was formal.

  Wyatt, snapping his fingers at intervals, continued on toward Madison. There the lights were against him, and he stood obediently on the curb. Pam drew Jerry to a show window and looked, with apparent fascination, at a display of office supplies. She was, Jerry thought, a little overdoing it. “All right,” he said, “he’s crossing Madison.” They went after him. The lights changed when they were in the middle of the avenue and a bus snarled at them. Jerry looked at it haughtily.

  “He’s going back to Grand Central,” Pam said. “It’s very suspicious, Jerry. I’m terribly afraid that—”

  But at Vanderbilt Avenue, Wyatt turned north. They went after him, cautious around the corner of the building. Wyatt was receding, moving more briskly.

  “It’s perfectly ridiculous,” Pam said, “to be doing this in high heels. If I’d only worn sneakers!”

  “You’d have looked odd at the Algonquin,” Jerry said. “Anyway, we don’t have—”

  “He’s going toward Park,” Pam said. “Let’s hurry, Jerry.”

  They hurried. They reached the end of Vanderbilt Avenue and turned east in Forty-seventh Street. Wyatt was at the corner of Park Avenue. Again he turned north. “I’ll bet I know,” Pam said.

  They followed up Park for several blocks. Wyatt reached a large apartment building. He turned into it. “I knew I knew,” Pam said.

  They reached the building on the ninth floor of which Bradley Fitch had died. They stopped in front of it.

  “Well,” Jerry said. “Now what, darling?”

  “Now,” Pam said, “you find a telephone and tell Bill where he is. I—I’ll just lurk.”

  Bill Weigand sat at his desk in his temporary office in the station house which was the headquarters of Homicide East. Mullins sat in a wooden chair, which was tilted back against the wall. Bill drummed lightly with his fingers on the desk top and Mullins sipped from a cardboard container partially full of a pale liquid which, before milk had been generously added, had been called coffee. Acting Captain Weigand had read for half an hour; he now sought to digest what he had read.

  A man had been in Rye. A man had been at a country club in upper Westchester. A man had conferred with the New York State Police at Hawthorne. A man had found, at the Yale Club, an acquaintance whose habitat was Wall Street. A man had reached, by telephone, the executive vice president of a real estate management corporation. Mullins had been, for several hours, in conversation with several men in Chicago. A man had awakened an editor of Variety in a hotel bedroom in West Forty-sixth Street. A man had spent the afternoon reading newspaper clippings in the morgue of The New York Times. A police department is a creature of many tentacles.

  Detective Matthew Rider had waited, on a partially shaded bench, while a man named Omar Patterson (of Patterson, Framingham & Cohen) had finished a set of tennis with a youth named Bert Collins. Mr. Patterson had won—6–3—and had left the court refreshed and in a tolerant mood. Mr. Patterson was sixty-seven; his destroyed antagonist was twenty-two; the sun shone on Mr. Patterson’s world, and brightened even the extraneous—Detective (First Grade) Matthew Rider. Matters were, thereby, expedited.

  Bill Weigand digested. Bradley Fitch’s residuary estate—estimated by Mr. Patterson in the word “phew!”—went to “this pretty actress he was going to marry”—Naomi Shaw, born Mary Shaftlich. To her, also, went the apartment in which Fitch had died. “Barn of a place. Co-op, you know.” To her went various articles of jewelry which had been Fitch’s mother’s. To her, further, went the Southampton estate.

  Mrs. Alicia Nelson—“cousin of his, you know”—received a bequest of $25,000. Several other, more distant, relatives received less. “Can’t keep it all in my head, you know,” Mr. Patterson said, running a towel over the thick gray hair of the head in question. There were relatively small bequests to several servants—one Henry Jones—“or is it Smith?”—got ten thousand; Rose Hemmins got the same amount, and occupancy for life of a cottage on the Long Island estate. Peggy Latham—“nice girl; more his kind, really”—received Fitch’s string of polo ponies.

  The will had, since Detective Rider asked, been made quite recently—six weeks ago, two months ago. He’d have to have a look at the instrument itself. The instrument was locked up in his office safe, and if the detective would drop around? The will which was the latest—“the latest we know about, anyway,” Patterson said—had superseded a will in which Mrs. Nelson got half the residue, the remaining half being divided among four other relatives. In that previous will, also, there had been a specific bequest of twenty-five thousand to “this other girl of his. Another actress.” Rider suggested a name.

  “That’s rig
ht,” Mr. Patterson said. “Girl named Barnscott. Went around with her for a while. She gets nothing this time.”

  Certain personal effects—“watch, that sort of thing”—went to a man named Strothers. “In this will, not the old one.”

  That was about the size of it, as memory served. Mr. Patterson had returned to the court, this time for doubles; Detective Rider, who was in his early thirties, and a canasta player, had shaken his head admiringly, and sought out a telephone.

  James Nelson, who was in his middle sixties, was a retired investment counsellor. “For retired, you can read broke, or damn near it,” a man named Foster told his companion over drinks at the Yale Club. His companion, a detective third grade (and also a member of the Yale Club) ordered another round and made encouraging sounds.

  “Followed his own advice, is what it came to,” Foster said. “One of these guys who inherits something and doesn’t know what to do with it. Know the type?” Detective Willings, whose father had undergone the same period of confusion, nodded.

  Mr. Nelson had managed to lose his money when all about him were doing nicely, which argued a special sort of talent. Since then he and his wife had been living pretty much on her money. “Some relation to this guy Fitch who got—but you know about that, Freddy.”

  Freddy Willings nodded. He knew about that.

  “Lot younger than he is,” Foster said. “Or so I hear. They’ve got a place up around Rye somewhere. His father’s place—probably one of these big barns you can’t do anything with. Know the kind I mean?”

  Detective Freddy Willings, who owned one, admitted knowing what Foster meant.

  “Princeton man,” Foster said. “Not that that means anything. Lots of all right guys went to Princeton. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Freddy Willings said.

  “Only thing is,” Foster said, “I hear that Nelson’s been drinking a lot lately. Sits in a customers’ room somewhere—not our shop—and goes out and has a quick one. Has a lot of quick ones. Doesn’t keep his wits about him. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What we need,” Foster said, “is another drink.”

  In time, Freddy Willings went to Homicide East and used a typewriter.

  Wesley Strothers had been around for some years. Started as a stage manager. “I’m damned if I know how stage managers do start,” an editor told a detective. Strothers had done some directing; he had got hold of a script he liked and become a producer. “Only trouble was, he picked a turkey.” He had kept at it. He had had other turkeys. He had had a moderate success; then another turkey which had, however, sold well to the movies.

  “Money of his own?”

  Not that the editor had ever heard of. Got production money from backers. “Like most everybody.”

  “However, he ought to make plenty now. Since they’re not going to close Corner. That one’s a mine. Hell, it’s a uranium mine.”

  “It’s going to keep running, then?”

  “That’s the word I hear. Damn shame if it doesn’t, because it hasn’t paid the nut yet, and like I said, it’s a mine.”

  The square man from Kansas City and Chicago, and from Pakistan, Robert Carr, had not, after all, been able to prove that he had been in Chicago when Bradley Fitch was killed. Sergeant Mullins had given him the opportunity, and afterward done what he could to check. A Robert Carr had, certainly, booked a seat on a late plane from LaGuardia on Friday night. He had checked in for the flight. It was, therefore, to be presumed he had made the flight. But it was not, therefore, proved he had made the flight. A Robert Carr had reserved a seat on a return plane, getting in late Saturday. Possibly they would, in time, if necessary, find someone who could testify that Carr had been on the plane. So far, they had not. “Which,” Mullins had said in his oral report, “we’ll have to admit don’t need to mean anything.”

  Somewhat more interestingly, some hours on the telephone had not enabled Mullins to find anyone in Chicago who could say Carr had been there Saturday. But this, again, did not necessarily mean anything. Asked to be specific, Carr had said that, from the airport, he had gone to his apartment—a small apartment he leased more or less permanently, and sublet when he was in the field. He had made several calls from there, seeking companionship, but had completed none of them. “Nobody stays in Chicago over weekends; not if they can help it.”

  Giving it up a little after noon Saturday, Carr had, he said, had a lonely drink or two, planning to go out afterward to a solitary lunch. About one o’clock he had turned on the radio and heard a brief report of Fitch’s death. “Time fits,” Mullins said. “They got out a bulletin fast. And there’s the difference in time.”

  Carr had been sure, talking to Mullins, that the superintendent of the building had seen him when, after hearing the news, he had left and got a cab for the airport. The superintendent, reached—with no little difficulty—by telephone had said, “Sure,” and then, “Sure, I guess so,” and, finally, “If Mr. Carr says he saw me I must have seen him. Stands to reason, don’t it? Course, I see lots of people lots of times.” And this was worth nothing.

  And Mullins, talking to Robert Carr, had said, all innocence, “Where did you say you were Friday night, Mr. Carr? Before you caught this airplane for Chicago?”

  “Why?” Carr asked.

  “Just wondered,” Mullins said, the innocence persisting. “Told the captain you were tied up, and he assumed it was some business deal. Just like to get things straight.”

  “What’s the point?” Carr said, and Mullins, quite ingenuous, had said he had been told to ask. He had said, as man to man, that it was funny the things the captain wanted to know.

  “Consider I’m laughing,” Carr said. He paused; seemed to think about it; looked for a long moment, with speculation, at Sergeant Mullins.

  “Seems you people get around,” he said, then. “O.K. I had a drink with my former wife. Had dinner with her afterward. Had things I wanted to talk to her about.”

  Mullins waited.

  “No,” Carr had said then. “I look at you and I say, does he look like Dorothy Dix? and I say, nope, can’t say he does.”

  “All he would say,” Mullins had reported. “Can’t say I got it.”

  “He more or less told you,” Bill said. “Advice to the lovelorn, sergeant. You write in and say, ‘I am only sixteen and my boy friend says all the other girls let their boy friends kiss them good night at least but—’”

  “Listen, Loot,” Mullins said.

  “In other words,” Bill said, “Carr was trying to talk her out of marrying Fitch. Or—so he implies.”

  “You think that was it?”

  “He may,” Bill said, “have been giving her a box of oxalic acid.”

  Drumming his fingers now, Bill thought of that, and decided that it was one of the possibilities which could not be dismissed. Not perhaps as he had phrased it. But the girl’s motive was obvious—it was almost obtrusive. Carr, if he thought to share the money she would inherit, shared her motive. There was no other motive stronger; none he could think of so strong. It would be convenient if that fact answered the question. It had never been his experience that things were necessarily so simple.

  There were too many with motives. Naomi’s (and Carr’s by association) was the strongest. He tried to think of the weakest. Jasper Tootle, in retroactive jealousy, by way of killing Phyllis Barnscott’s past? He smiled faintly at the thought. But it was no more ridiculous than situations which had led to murder. People killed, sometimes, for very little—not, say, for a large inheritance, but for a small one which loomed large. Like, he thought, ten thousand dollars in cash and the occupancy of—

  The telephone rang.

  9

  Sunday, 8:35 P.M. to 10:05 P.M.

  It is difficult to lurk satisfactorily on Park Avenue; it is particularly difficult on a Sunday evening in June. Lurking is best done where there is cover; one lurks among; a solitary lurker is at a disadvantage. The Park Avenue sidewalks, never so
occupied as those of Fifth, so nervously alive as those of Madison, take on an almost embarrassing tranquility on Sunday evenings in summer. Lurking to the best of her ability, Pamela North felt uncomfortably conspicuous.

  There were, to be sure, some people about her. Most of them seemed to be walking dogs. With a dog, Pam thought, sauntering distractedly north to the nearest intersection (but snatching watchful peeps over her shoulder toward the entrance of the apartment house) it would be much simpler. A person with a dog lurks of necessity, making frequent halts in a generally aimless progression. The dog explains everything. A cat, even if Pam had happened to have one with her, would have been of no use whatever. There are advantages to dogs, she admitted, grudgingly, and turned and walked down Park again. Dozens of people, at least, were, she was certain, watching her from windows. There had never been a more public lurk.

  She passed—and this was for the fourth time, or perhaps the fifth—the entrance to the elderly and dignified apartment house in which Bradley Fitch had died, and into which Samuel Wyatt recently had popped. It was no longer very recently, Pam thought, and looked at the watch on her wrist. It was a good quarter of an hour since Jerry had gone off to find a telephone. It was taking Jerry long enough.

  The doorman of the apartment house looked at her, Pam decided, very intently. He must think she was out of her mind, or worse. Probably he thought she was casing the place; perhaps at any moment he would call the police and have her arrested for loitering. Loitering with intent. Or was that something you could do only in Britain? If only she had a dog. Even a small dog. Even a Peke. Temporarily, of course, because what the cats would do to a Peke hardly bore thinking about. What they would do to a Great Dane, for that matter.

  Having passed the entrance, Pam was now constrained to resume looking over her shoulder from time to time to make sure Wyatt did not pop out again unobserved. This, Pam thought, is going to give me a crick in the neck. Wherever did Jerry go? Surely it shouldn’t take him all this time to find a telephone here in the middle of the city of New York. Of course, there isn’t much open on Park this time of a Sunday. Even on Madison—perhaps he’s had to go clear down to Grand Central.