The Long Skeleton

by Frances

  “In her own apartment down the hall? It was down the hall?”

  At the end of the hall; a corner suite. So far as Bill knew, nothing had been found there to indicate that Amanda Towne was killed there. That would be one of the things that Mullins, reading through reports, would catch them up on. “After all,” Bill Weigand said, “I’ve only been on it a couple of hours.”

  “And,” Pam said, “came right to us.”

  It had seemed the best place to come; the best starting place, since it had started with them. Bill finished his second drink. It was a little after seven, then.

  “Eat with us?” Jerry said. “Here or anywhere?”

  Bill thought not; he thought he would, if he could find him, pay a visit to former Judge Parkman, and listen to denials. That was a step, the next of many steps. He went; the Norths remained, ate substantially, debated whether to go home to paint or, again, to try a hotel.

  “Home,” Pam decided for them. “Paint or no paint. I’ve had enough of hotels, for the moment.”

  Bill drove his Buick, which had been parked somewhat illegally, through Fortieth toward Park—toward Park and the Upper East Side and the house of former Judge Roger Parkman, who had become, within days, a former prospect for high office. Because, as Pam said, Amanda Towne had punctured his subconscious, occasioning a leak. Bill grinned to himself, and the radio spoke.

  “Car X-one,” the radio said. “Calling Car X-one. Come in please. Car X-one. Calling—”

  “Car X-one,” Bill said. “Weigand speaking.”

  The radio squawked. It squawked of death.

  Bill turned down Park, instead of up. He used red headlights and, at Fourteenth Street, where traffic swirled sluggishly, he let the siren whine. Not that things wouldn’t wait, not that there was any hurry, any more. But you got there as fast as you could, all the same.

  “There” was Bank Street, well west; “there” was an area of elderly houses, converted to walkups; “there” was the third floor of one of the walkups—not much of an apartment, an apartment of worn furniture, and a good many books and magazines, and a typewriter on a bridge table.

  A good many men were in the small apartment when Bill Weigand reached it. Murder draws a good many men.

  Russell Barnes lay on the floor, near the small fireplace in the living room. His head had been beaten in. There was blood all over the poker with which—but not that day—he had stirred fires of cannel coal.

  Mullins—Sergeant Aloysius Mullins—was one of the men in the little room. He stood and watched routine. He said, to Bill Weigand, that the inspector was sure going to love this. He said, “The Towne dame’s husband, or ex,” and pointed. He pointed to a framed photograph on a bookshelf. “The Towne dame,” he said. “Ten-fifteen years ago, maybe.”

  Bill looked at the photograph—the photograph of a woman, and a pretty woman, with wide forehead and slightly pointed face, with lips parted in a smile and perfect teeth in evidence. So that was, had been, Amanda Towne. “She hadn’t changed a lot,” Mullins said. “Looks pretty much the same in the shots the boys took. Only dead, of course.”

  Bill Weigand nodded. He said, “O.K. now?” to a photographer, whose camera stared down at the dead man. “One more,” the photographer said, and took one more, and said, “All right, captain.” Bill crouched and looked at what had been Russell Barnes. He had been in his sixties, at a guess; his hair was gray and had needed cutting; his face was heavy and sagged somewhat, and he did not look as if he had been a particularly happy man. The face was untouched; he had been hit from behind, more than once. There was blood around the battered head.

  He had not, Bill thought, been dead long—two hours, perhaps, or three. It was seven-thirty-five, then. “All right,” a voice said. “Let’s have a look at it.”

  Bill stood up and an assistant medical examiner crouched. His examination was brief; he looked up at Bill Weigand. “Two to four hours,” he said. “Never knew what hit him.”

  “Right,” Bill said, and watched the assistant medical examiner stand up, and rub his hands on a handkerchief. Bill stood, then, and watched—abstractedly—while prints were taken from dead fingers. He watched, but did not really see, the familiar routine. It was, he thought, rather lucky for Pam and Jerry North that Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley was, for the moment, merely supervising. O’Malley was a man to put two and two together, and frequently come up with a lot.

  Not Judge Parkman now. Judge Parkman could wait. The machine was working—a man sketched the room quickly, with chairs and worn sofa and body noted; the print men dusted; a lab man waited with a vacuum. The machine would carry the body off to the mortuary at Bellevue and all it wore and carried would be scrutinized, as the body itself would be scrutinized. The machine did not need Bill’s help, or anyone’s guidance. It would, in time—and not much time—produce reports.

  “Come on,” Bill said to Mullins, and they went on. They sat for a moment in Bill’s car.

  “It’s going to be a screwy one,” Mullins said.

  “I know,” Bill said. “The Norths are in it. You want to go talk to Judge Parkman? Let him say he didn’t do it?”

  “O.K., loot,” Mullins said. The habit of years stuck; with others absent, Weigand would always be “loot,” promotion notwithstanding.

  Bill dropped Mullins at the Fourteenth Street station of the West Side IRT. Bill found a telephone. He found the number of the Globe-Dispatch and dialed and waited until a male voice—a young male voice, but weary for all that—said, “Globe-Dispatch.”

  “I’d like to talk to somebody in the city room,” Bill said. “The city editor?”

  “Nobody there,” the young voice said, with greater weariness. “This is an afternoon paper, mister. Mr. Perkins goes off around five. Around six, everybody goes off.”

  “Perkins,” Bill said. “He’s the city editor? He’d be the one to talk to about a copyreader?”

  “Depends on what—who is this, anyway?”

  Bill told him.

  “Gee.” The young voice was no longer weary. “Something we ought to—”

  “You will,” Bill told him. “Where can I find Mr. Perkins?”

  “We’re not supposed—” the boy said, and hesitated. “You’re sure you’re the police?”

  Bill was.

  Paul Perkins, city editor of the Globe-Dispatch, lived in the Murray Hill district. He had a telephone, number not listed but provided. His answering voice was clipped, precise. Bill told him, briefly, what there was to tell. Paul Perkins would be damned. He would certainly talk to Captain Weigand.

  He opened the apartment door to Captain Weigand ten minutes later. He was in his early forties; he was a neat, quick man with a crew cut. He took Bill Weigand into a large, comfortably furnished, living room. A dark-haired woman stood by a sofa. “Police captain, Myra,” Perkins said. “My wife, captain.”

  “Weigand,” Bill said, and, from somewhere else, a child said, “Mama!” Myra Perkins shrugged, with a kind of gentleness, and smiled, and went.

  “Drink?” Perkins said, and Bill shook his head.

  “It’s a hell of a note,” Perkins said. “Poor old guy. Why?”

  They didn’t know; they would find out. Did Perkins know any reason why Russell Barnes, former husband of Amanda Towne, should, within hours after his wife’s death, find it important to see Gerald North, of North Books, Inc.?

  “No,” Perkins said, crisp and precise.

  “Nothing concerned with the paper?”

  “No. Barnes is—was—a copyreader. On the rim. Good reliable man. Needed a day off now and then to sober up. Not a fast man—and didn’t railroad copy, as some of them do.”

  “I take it,” Bill said, “that he wouldn’t be working on a story?”

  “No,” Perkins said, and qualified. “Not that I know about. Not assigned to anything—wouldn’t be, of course. Reads what comes across the desk. Spells for those who can’t. Puts in punctuation. Sees that things make sense. Writes headlin
es.”

  “I know,” Bill said.

  “Used to be a reporter,” Perkins said. “Most of them used to be, you know. Been around a long time, Russ had. Chicago. St. Louis. Kansas City. All over the lot.” Perkins considered. “The old-timers got around, generally,” he said.

  “Mine, mama,” a child’s voice said, from somewhere. It was not the same child’s voice, Bill thought.

  “Two of them,” Perkins said. “Six and eight. We don’t get around so much nowadays. Generally. You think Russ’s death ties in with his wife’s?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Perkins would.

  “You’re sitting on it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “On the a.m.’s time,” Perkins said. “Our man, their story.” He shrugged. “You want to know what I know about him, I suppose? I don’t know what he was up to. Why he wanted to get in touch with a publisher. Shouldn’t think he’d have a book up his sleeve.” He considered. “Of course,” he said. “You can’t always tell. Sure you won’t have a drink?”

  Bill shook his head. He listened to clipped words, to facts precisely ordered.

  Barnes had been about sixty-four or sixty-five. The office records would fix it. He had worked for the Globe-Dispatch for about four years, always on the rim of the copy desk. He worked from eight to four-thirty five days a week. He got a little better than the Guild minimum. He was steady—except for his infrequent hangovers—not outstanding. Now and then, when he got a story he liked, particularly one that had the “light touch,” he wrote a headline which was out of the ordinary. He was friendly enough with the rest of the staff—even with the rewrite men—but not especially friendly, so far as Paul Perkins knew, with any.

  “He called Mrs. North about a quarter of twelve,” Bill said. “He’d have been on his lunch hour?”

  “Probably,” Perkins said. “You’d have to ask Cliff. He’s the slot man.” He looked at Bill. “Runs the copy desk,” he amplified. “Probably Barnes goes—went—off about eleven-thirty, after the makeover goes in. Supposed to take half an hour.”

  “He said he didn’t want to call through the switchboard,” Bill said. “I suppose he meant the office switchboard. ‘Tip the whole thing off,’ he told Mrs. North. Does that suggest anything?”

  It did not. The girls might listen in. They seldom had time enough. He could think of no reason they should listen in. Still—one never knew.

  “What would he tip?” Perkins asked.

  Bill didn’t know. Perkins had mentioned Chicago as a place Russell Barnes had worked. What did Perkins know of those days?

  “Hearsay,” Perkins said, and amplified. There were—had been more often in the old days—certain newspapermen of whom most other newspapermen had heard. The old-timers. Often, Perkins thought, remembered as more than life-sized—the Paul Bunyans of the trade. Barnes had been one of those, twenty years before, twenty-five years before. Chiefly in Chicago. A top man, getting top stories. Briefly, Perkins thought, a correspondent during the first World War. One of the “old Chicago crowd.” Perkins did not know how deeply one. A reputation for brilliance. Perkins did not know how justified.

  It was in those days, apparently, that he had married Amanda Towne, who must have been a girl just starting in.

  “At a guess,” Perkins said, “she must have been twenty years younger. You’d think so?”

  “About that,” Bill said.

  “He never talked much about her,” Perkins said. “Not to me, anyway. He never talked much to me about anything, as a matter of fact. I gather they were separated, not divorced?”

  “Apparently,” Bill said. “What happened to Barnes? To—rub off the luster?”

  “I suppose,” Perkins said, “he just got older, don’t you? They used to talk about newspaper work being ‘a young man’s game.’ But then, what isn’t, come down to it? I wish I knew, don’t you? Of course, he may have drunk too much. He didn’t with us. Just—slowed down, I guess.”

  “After he and Miss Towne separated?”

  “I don’t know. It could be. Or maybe she, being a lot younger, slowed him down. Hard to keep up with people twenty years younger sometimes, especially when you’re married to them. At least, I suppose it is. Not a thing I’ve ever tried. Get tired running to keep up, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “You don’t know whether he and Miss Towne saw much of each other? Recently, I mean?”

  Perkins shook his head.

  “She could have called him at the office? Or he her, of course?”

  “Sure. Why not? You think she could have told him something—who was going to kill her, say?”

  Bill grinned at that, briefly. He said he didn’t know what to think, at the moment. He said, at the moment, he was just poking around. If Mrs. Barnes had called her husband, at the office, would anybody be likely to know about it? Remember it? If, say, she got the switchboard and said, “I’d like to speak to Mr. Barnes, please. This is Amanda Towne calling.”

  Perkins considered. He supposed, if it had been like that, one of the girls on the board might remember. Since almost everybody had heard, if only vaguely, of Amanda Towne.

  “To get him,” Bill said, “she would—do what? The switchboard girl, I mean. He wouldn’t have a special extension?”

  “Call the copy desk,” Perkins said. “Probably Cliff would answer. Say, ‘Call for you, Russ.’”

  “Cliff—what’s the rest of his name, by the way?”

  “Clifford Cohen,” Perkins said.

  “Would Mr. Cohen remember?”

  Perkins doubted it. He might. But, if she had called—he supposed Weigand meant recently—what?

  “I haven’t the least idea,” Bill said.

  “And,” Perkins pointed out, “they’re both dead.”

  There was no doubt of that.

  “Look,” Perkins said. “This is going to be quite a story. He was our man. Do we get a break of any kind? A—slight leak here and there?”

  “Officially—” Bill said, and let it hang.

  “Of course,” Perkins said. “I realize that. However?”

  “It is hard,” Bill said, carefully, “to say what might come up, Mr. Perkins.”

  Perkins said he would settle for that. He said Cliff Cohen lived up in Riverhead, if Captain Weigand wanted to talk to him. He said he could easily have one of the boys talk to the telephone operators. “No,” Bill said, “we’ll do it. You’ve got Mr. Cohen’s number?”

  Perkins had. He would do more; he would try to get Cliff on the telephone, pave the way. He did. He said, “Cliff there? Paul Perkins,” and waited and said, aside, “Kid always answers the telephone at Cliff’s place.” He said, “Cliff? Russ Barnes was killed tonight. Chap here from the police—Captain Weigand—’d like to ask you a question.”

  He held the telephone out. Bill asked the question. “When?” Clifford Cohen asked, and spoke like Princeton. Bill did not know. The day before; any time in the last few days.

  It seemed to Clifford Cohen that he did remember, vaguely. Yesterday? He thought, probably, Tuesday. A woman had called, he did remember that, now. He had handed the telephone to Barnes, who had stood up and turned away from the desk, for privacy. It was Cohen’s impression that the call had been short; his even vaguer impression that it had ended with Barnes saying something like, “I’ll call you back.” He had no idea whatever whether the caller had been Amanda Towne. He was sorry he couldn’t help more.

  “It doesn’t get you much of anywhere, does it?” Perkins said, and Bill admitted it didn’t get him much of anywhere. But—

  He thanked Paul Perkins. After a moment’s consideration, and in answer to a question, he said it was perfectly all right if the Globe-Dispatch mentioned the telephone call, speculated on its source.

  Bill drove back to West Twentieth Street. Inspector O’Malley wanted him, on the double. He had been a little afraid of that. He drove uptown to borough command headquarters.


  VI

  Behind his desk, Deputy Chief Inspector O’Malley looked choleric. When he spoke, he proved choleric. Bill had expected this, if not looked forward to it. Inspector O’Malley is not, at best, a man of even temper. Association with Mr. and Mrs. North, even, as now, at one remove, does not put him at his best. And there was, Bill gloomily thought, more to come.

  “All right,” O’Malley said, “what’ve you got?”

  Bill had two dead people; had husband and wife dead. O’Malley knew that.

  “Nothing conclusive,” Bill told him. “Miss Towne—or Mrs. Barnes—was definitely smothered. Barnes was beaten to death. With a poker.”

  “I can read,” O’Malley said, and gestured toward reports on his desk. “What’ve you got, man?”

  Reporters had been after O’Malley. That was clear. His allergy to reporters is second only to his allergy to Norths. What Bill had, and had now to tell, was not calculated to mollify.

  “Barnes was trying to get in touch with Mr. North today,” Bill said. “Around noon. Was to have met him at—”

  He stopped. O’Malley had half risen from his chair. His red face seemed to expand.

  “North!” he said, profanely. “Every time anybody turns around—” He subsided into his office chair. It was painful to see his effort at control. Probably, Bill thought, his doctor had advised. “Remember your pressure,” his doctor probably had said. “Don’t let things get you.”

  “Why?” O’Malley said, his voice leaden with calm. “Just tell me why!” But he shouted the last.

  “North doesn’t know,” Bill told him. “It seems Barnes talked to Mrs. North first and—”

  O’Malley gripped the edge of his desk. Bill waited for the paroxysm to pass.

  “Don’t,” O’Malley said, “tell me what she said he said. Just don’t, Bill.”

  It was entreaty, reinforced by the familiarity of Christian name. It was man to man.

  Bill did not. He summarized. He told of the wait of the Norths at Bleeck’s, of Barnes’s failure to appear—nothing of Pam’s having been under, or partly under, a sofa. He spared O’Malley as he could.