Death of an Angel

by Frances Lockridge

“Hard to get anything out of her,” Mullins said. “Not that she doesn’t talk.” He sighed. “Never heard anybody talk so fast.”

  Bill went ahead of Mullins into the living room. A uniformed sergeant stood in front of a woman of middle age, who had pale red hair, who wore a dark blue dressing gown, who talked and wept. “Yes’m,” the sergeant said, and nodded. “That’s right, ma’am. Don’t you worry.”

  The sergeant turned to Weigand when Weigand reached them. “All worked up,” the sergeant said. “Name’s Blythe. Mrs. Nellie Blythe. She’s—”

  “—forgive myself,” Nellie Blythe said, and her plump hands fluttered. “Never. If I’d only—”

  “—been going on like this ever since I got here. Maybe we ought to get a doctor.”

  They would see, Bill told him.

  “Well,” the sergeant said, “wish you luck, captain. You talk to the captain, now, ma’am. Tell him what happened.”

  “Nobody’s doing anything,” Nellie Blythe said, and put her hands over her eyes and swayed backward and forward on the straight chair she sat on. “The poor lamb’ll be—oh dear, oh dear. In-a-trunk, like-as-not.” Her speech was very rapid, and indistinct.

  “Mrs. Blythe,” Weigand said. He drew a chair up and sat in front of her. “Listen to me.” She did not appear to hear him. “Mrs. Blythe!” he said, raising his voice. “You want to help, don’t you?”

  “The poor lamb,” Nellie Blythe said. “The-poor-poor-lamb.” But she looked at Bill Weigand. “Can’t you do something?” she said. “Can’t you do anything?”

  “I have to know what happened,” Bill said. “Start at the beginning.”

  “I’ve told it over and over,” she said. “Nobody does anything. At the bottom of the river by now, like as not. I’ll never forgive myself—never. The pretty sweet thing and after all these years of taking care of her and saying, ‘I can’t think what I’d do without you, Nellie dear,’ and pressing out her pretty little dresses to say nothing of—”

  The words ran together.

  “Tell me what happened,” Bill said. “Start at the beginning. What time was it?”

  “—taking her breakfast in every morning and—what did you say?”

  He leaned toward her. He said, very slowly, very carefully, “What time did this happen?”

  “I looked at the clock,” she said. “It was a quarter of one. When I first heard them. Shouting, he was, and threatening and—”

  It took time. It took patience. Patience can be hard to maintain when one is tired; a story can be hard to get from a woman who is almost hysterical.

  Naomi Shaw had come in before eleven that evening. She had come in alone. There had been nothing the waiting Nellie Blythe could do for her. She had seemed in good spirits. She had sent Mrs. Blythe to bed, and Mrs. Blythe had climbed the stairs to her room on the third floor, and undressed and gone to bed.

  She had been awakened by raised voices, a man’s dominant. The voices came from the living room below. She could not, at least at first, make out words. And, at first, she heard only the man’s voice, not Naomi’s. “Such a pretty soft voice she had, the lamb.” At first, Nellie Blythe had felt no alarm.

  “She’d let whoever it was in,” she explained. “That’s what I thought. I ought to have known. I’ll never forgive—”

  “There was no way you could have known,” Bill told her. “No doubt she had done the same thing before.”

  “If you mean—” Mrs. Blythe said.

  He meant nothing, he told her. Theater people keep late hours. They are gregarious. He meant only that.

  “The sweetest lamb ever was,” Mrs. Blythe said. “Whatever anybody says. I won’t have anybody—”

  “The voices kept you awake?”

  That was it. At first she had merely assumed a somewhat noisy caller. Possibly some friend of Miss Nay’s who had had a drink or two. She had turned over and tried to go back to sleep. It was possible that she had even dozed a little. But then, again, the voices had awakened her. This time the man had spoken so loudly.

  “—do what I tell you!”

  She had heard that very clearly. “He was shouting at her.” And she had heard Naomi Shaw’s answer. It had been, “—no good to yell at me.”

  There had been, then, a period during which the listening, by now frightened, woman two floors above could understand no words, although the man still shouted and Naomi Shaw still answered him, in a voice less violent, but still raised. “She was worked up, the poor lamb. That lovely voice of hers, but sometimes she got worked up. Oh dear! Oh dear!”

  The plump hands began to flutter again.

  “I’ll never forgive—” she said.

  “Mrs. Blythe!” Bill said. “Pull yourself together. What happened then?”

  They had, apparently, merely kept on with it. “Him threatening. And I just laid there and—”

  Once Naomi Shaw had said something about “waking the neighborhood.” Once the man had said, “—can’t get away with it, no use trying.” And, somewhat later, Naomi had said, “No! I tell you—no! I—”

  “It was like he’d grabbed her,” Mrs. Blythe said. “Put his big hands on her pretty little neck. Choked her! So she couldn’t finish what she started to say.”

  There had been silence, then. And the silence was more frightening than the shouted words had been. Then Mrs. Blythe had got out of her bed, and put her robe around her, and gone to the head of the stairs.

  “Like I should have done at first. I’ll never—”

  “You heard nothing?”

  “After a minute. Somebody slammed the door.”

  She called down, then; called, “Miss Nay? Are you all right, Miss Nay?” She had not been answered. She had hurried down the stairs, clutching the robe around her, calling to Naomi Shaw as she hurried down. And hearing no answer, hearing no sound.

  “Lying there, all bloody. The poor, poor lamb,” Mrs. Blythe said, and Bill Weigand, startled, said, “What?”

  “I expected that,” she said. “The poor lamb dead in her own blood. Or strangled, with her pretty face all black and ugly. Or—”

  “But actually?” Bill said.

  “She wasn’t there. Nobody was there. The lights were on but—there was nobody there! Kidnapped. That’s what it was. The poor lamb kidnapped. Taken some place and murdered, like as not. Crammed in a trunk, like they do. Or cement poured on her and dropped in the river.”

  “There’s no reason to think that,” Bill said. “Try not to be so excited, Mrs. Blythe.”

  “No reason,” she said. “He says—no reason!” She looked imploringly at the ceiling. “Threatened by this great hulking beast. Kidnapped. Dragged out of her own home. And he says—”

  “You didn’t see the man. You couldn’t have, could you?”

  “Heard him,” she said. “Hearing was plenty.”

  “But,” Bill said, “not enough to show you he was a big man. A hulking man.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” Mrs. Blythe said. “Not if I live to be a hundred.”

  “You didn’t recognize the voice? You probably know most of Miss Shaw’s friends.”

  “He was shouting,” she said. “How can you tell when people shout? Anyway, the voices come up through something. So they don’t sound right.” She paused. “Like one of those echo-chamber things,” she said. “Oh dear, oh dear!” She began to rock back and forth again.

  Bill stood up. He beckoned the uniformed sergeant, asked him to see what he could do. Get her something to drink; if necessary, get a doctor to give her a sedative.

  With Mullins, Bill checked the first floor. They found nothing that proved, or indeed, suggested, anything. They went through the rest of the house, and found nothing—no aftermath of violence, nothing. In closets on the second floor—closets off bedroom, and off dressing room—many pretty dresses hung prettily. In a small storage room a trunk and matched luggage had gathered a just perceptible film of dust.

  “Nothing to get us anywhere,” Mullins said,
and added that as he had said, it was a screwy one. “We put it on the tickers?”

  They did, Bill agreed—and he, Mullins, could see to it.

  Bill Weigand used the telephone. A bell in Wesley Strothers’ downtown apartment rang unanswered. So did a bell in Samuel Wyatt’s uptown apartment. At Robert Carr’s hotel no bell was rung. Mr. Carr had checked out that afternoon.

  By ten-thirty Monday morning, Acting Captain William Weigand had been at his desk for almost two hours. He had a slight headache. His eyes smarted. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley wanted to see him at eleven o’clock. It was, in all respects, a bad morning. Lack of sleep and superfluity of Inspector O’Malley were in themselves bad enough. But those things could be borne. Bill Weigand had borne them for some years.

  The late editions of the morning newspapers were full of it. “Nay Shaw Snatched,” the Daily Mirror announced on its front page, the three words occupying the front page. The New York Herald Tribune had found time to select, and front page space to print, a picture (in bathing suit) of Miss Naomi Shaw, star of Around the Corner, mysteriously missing from her home after an apparent quarrel with an unidentified man. The New York Times reported that the police had sent out a nine-state alarm for Miss Naomi Shaw after they had been summoned to the house she occupied in East Sixty-second Street and found her maid in hysterics and Miss Shaw missing.

  Considering the late hour at which the absence of the actress had been reported, journalistic enterprise had been extreme. The early editions of the afternoon papers would go to town on it. Inspector O’Malley would be displeased. Bill was displeased himself.

  He had had the solution in his hands. It had been snatched away. It came to that. He had gone home after a long day’s work and, as he drove through almost deserted streets, the solution had become obvious—so obvious that he wondered he could ever have been in doubt. All logic pointed in one direction, and if legal proof did not—well, legal proof would no doubt be forthcoming. It almost always was. But then the telephone had rung loudly in his apartment. He could still hear it ringing. And with the first words he had heard on the telephone, the logical structure had crumbled.

  You could not, so far as he could now see, fit the kidnapping of Naomi Shaw into anything. He had spent most of the night trying to, while awake and while dreaming. He had worried at it while he drove to the office of Homicide East; it had nagged at him, while he read accumulated reports, which had to do with the murders of Bradley Fitch and Rose Hemmins, but not with the disappearance of Naomi Shaw. On that, there was nothing. Bulletins had gone out over teletypes and, so far as results were concerned, fallen over the edge of the earth.

  He had read a copy of Fitch’s will, and found that it repeated what he knew. He had learned, from the report of a State policeman, that Mr. and Mrs. James Nelson had, that spring, discharged the full-time gardener they had employed for years, and that one three-acre piece of their considerable acreage, previously part of the expansive lawn, had been let go to meadow. It was even reported that Mrs. Nelson was doing some of her own cooking. Mr. Nelson had, for some months, been buying blended whiskey.

  Mr. Wesley Strothers was at present in his apartment in a creaky building on Bank Street, and it was to be presumed that he was sleeping there, since he had got in about three in the morning. Where he had been from the time Bill left him, drinking coffee, presumably in for the night—although he had not said so—to the time of his belated return was anybody’s guess. He had been gone when a detective arrived to keep vigil, which meant that he must have left his apartment shortly after Bill had left him.

  The telephone rang. Sergeant Mullins answered it, listened, said, “Yeah. Thanks,” and hung up.

  Mrs. James Nelson had checked out of the Barclay at nine thirty-five. She had checked out for herself and her husband, but her husband had not been in evidence. She had got into a cab, with luggage, and been driven to Grand Central. She was now one of a small group waiting for the gates to open on the 10:55 New Haven local, due in Stamford at 12:01—and at Rye, New York, at 11:41. Her husband was still not in evidence.

  Mr. Arnold Latham, Jr., interviewed on a Long Island golf course late the afternoon before, had said he had not seen Bradley Fitch in months and hadn’t wanted to see him. He said that, living or dead, Bradley Fitch was, to him, a heel of the first water. He had said that if they started bothering his sister he would see about it. He had said that she had had enough grief with that heel. He said that all he knew about Naomi Shaw was that she was in some show or other, and that he hadn’t seen the show. How Mr. Latham had spent his evening and night was nobody’s damned business. And he knew what his rights were.

  Mr. Samuel Wyatt had gone from the Park Avenue apartment house, after Bill had interviewed him, to his hotel, and to his room. He had, so far as was known, remained in it—so far as was known. If he had had reason, he could have got out unseen and returned unseen. Perfect surveillance is not to be achieved, within the limits imposed by manpower.

  The telephone rang.

  Sergeant Mullins said, “Yeah.” He said, “That’s just dandy, Joe.” To Weigand he said, “Mr. Wyatt has just had breakfast sent up to his room.”

  “That,” Bill said, “is just dandy. Breakfast for one?”

  “Joe didn’t—” Mullins began, and then said, “Hey! You think that—”

  “No, sergeant,” Bill said. “I doubt if he’s got Miss Shaw in his room.”

  Miss Phyllis Barnscott’s movements had not been checked on since she had left the Algonquin the evening before, presumably to meet Mr. Jasper Tootle. Mr. Tootle had not yet been checked on at all. Mr. G. K. Snaith, artists’ representative, had telephoned the police at a few minutes after nine that morning. He had wanted to know what things were coming to if a bunch of hoodlums could kidnap a girl like Naomi Shaw—“an artist”—right from under their noses. He had been asked whether he had any suggestions. His only suggestion had been that they’d better find her, pronto.

  Mr. Snaith owned ten per cent of her, Bill thought. He probably regarded her kidnapping as a form of grand larceny.

  Mr. Robert Carr, after checking out of his hotel, had vanished. It was possible that he had returned to Chicago. It was also possible, of course, that he had returned to Pakistan. But when he heard of the disappearance of his former wife, he would probably return. With, Bill Weigand thought, bells on. He—

  The telephone rang.

  Sergeant Mullins said it was Mullins speaking. He said, “Yes’m, he is.” He said. “Do you now?” He said, “Well, I am. In a manner of speaking.” He held a hand over the transmitter and said, “Mrs. North. She says she knows who killed ’em. She says I’m very Irish this morning.”

  Bill took the telephone. In spite of himself, his voice sounded weary. He could hear the weariness, the depression, in his own voice.

  “Jerry and I talked about it all night,” Pam North said. “Well, most of the night. What’s the matter with you, Bill?”

  “Nothing,” Bill Weigand said. “I was up most of the night too. About the murders?”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Although mostly about the tea-towel. Then we saw how it had to be.”

  “Both of you?”

  “Well—in the end. At first Jerry kept thinking about Mr. Braithwaite. Do you ever read Braithwaite?”

  “No,” Bill said.

  “I keep telling Jerry that,” Pam said. “But he shows sales figures. About the murders. It had to be a woman, of course. But probably you’ve already seen that. Please, Gin!”

  Bill had not. He said he had not. He was told why it had to be a woman. He said, “Well—” There was also the matter of the cat, sacrificed to throw suspicion on Samuel Wyatt. “Well—” Bill said.

  “You don’t,” Pam said, “seem as interested as I’d hoped. Coals to Newcastle?”

  “What? Oh—I had thought about the tea-towel. You’re probably right that she was showing it to the man who killed her. Quite possibly because it had been, as you say, w
added up. And—”

  “Man?” Pam said. “But that’s the whole point. Men don’t. I mean, not enough for it to be a habit. What I mean is—”

  “I know,” Bill said. “And as for the cat, did you ever think of a double frame?”

  “I don’t—oh. You mean Mr. Wyatt could have framed himself? So we’d think he’d been? But isn’t the trouble with that that we mightn’t notice he had been? I mean in the first place?” She paused. “I make it sound very complicated, don’t I? And you’re tired already. Wait—has something else happened?”

  “Haven’t you read the papers, Pam?”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Bill! It hasn’t started?”

  It was a comment on the world they lived in that this needed no interpretation. Bill said it had not started; he said that, if it did, it was unlikely they would need newspapers to tell them so. He said, “Do you get the latest editions?”

  “No,” Pam said. “I don’t see why, either. When we live right here in New York. Often as not, we don’t get Mr. Atkinson until the next day. What was in the late editions?”

  He told her. She said, “Oh.” She said, “No wonder you’re tired.” There was a long pause.

  “It doesn’t fit, does it?” Pam said. “She’s sure it was a man? The maid, I mean?”

  She was quite sure, Bill told her.

  “Of course,” Pam said, “she was on the third floor. She was half asleep.”

  “A man. Shouting.”

  “Phyllis Barnscott has a very deep voice. Almost baritone sometimes.”

  “Still, I doubt it.”

  There was a longer pause.

  “I thought I had it all worked out,” Pam North said.

  “So did I, as a matter of fact.”

  There was surprise in Pam’s voice, then. She said she couldn’t see what it did to Bill’s theory. Hers—yes. Unless they wanted a coincidence. But his—he already thought it was a man.

  “Mine too,” Bill said. “Because, as you say, it doesn’t fit in. The point is—mine was the wrong man. The whole point having been—” He stopped. Something had flickered in his mind; flickered out again.

  “Are you still there?” Pam said. “Or have you just gone to sleep?”