A Key to Death

by Frances

  “Maybe not. Maybe I moved too quick.” He took a cigar out of the top drawer of his desk, bit off the end. “Want one?” he said, clearly on second thought.

  “Not right now,” Bill said.

  “You been shot at much, captain?” Halpern asked, and flicked a kitchen match with a broad thumb nail.

  “Now and then,” Bill said. “Goes with the job, Mr. Halpern.”

  “Yeah,” Halpern said. “Suppose it does. They tried to get me last night. Hear about that?”

  “I heard somebody did. Yes.”

  “Same pack of rats thought up this other deal,” Halpern said. “Guess they figured it wasn’t working out right, what with Mr. Ingraham in it. Figured to hurry things up.”

  “If you know the men—” Bill said.

  “Sure,” Halpern said. “Point them out and what? Twenty guys show up and say they was all playing tiddlywinks. Anyhow, I didn’t. Didn’t see them to know them, and wouldn’t have known them anyway. Just who hired them. They ain’t nice boys, captain. They’re racket boys. Somebody gets in the way—bang!”

  “You think Mr. Ingraham might have got in the way.”

  Halpern looked at Bill Weigand with eyes narrowed in his broad, roughly reddened face.

  “See that, huh?” he said. “Could be. Could be they figured he was getting something on them. Maybe he was—maybe we both were.”

  “You thought of that this morning? Thought it was a good place to get out of?”

  “Could be,” Halpern said. “No point in making it too easy for the rats. Like the fellow says.”

  Bill Weigand waited to hear what the fellow said. He was not enlightened.

  “Tell you what,” Halpern said. “Ill give you the setup. You want to listen? Can’t make you believe it, but you want to listen?”

  “Well,” Bill Weigand said, “that’s what I came for, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t, Halpern said, have to take his word for it. But this was the way it was—did the captain know much about the union?

  “Go ahead.”

  It was a union of men who weren’t particularly skilled. They didn’t get the wages of skilled workers. They got better wages now than they had ten years ago. That was about all anybody could say. Halpern had helped organize the union, he had been its president for the past ten years. “I make a little more than the boys. Not a hell of a lot more.” The union was, now, affiliated with the Federation. It had a contract; it had another contract coming up for negotiation. “We’re getting the squeeze, the way things are. More than most.” But to take the squeeze off, to bargain for what they could get, that was what the union was for—what Halpern and the other officers were paid for.

  Since the signing of the previous contract, they had slowly been building up funds to be used if, the next time, they “had trouble.”

  “What these newspaper guys call a ‘war chest,’” Halpern said.

  The money came slowly, out of low wages. It hadn’t built fast; it wasn’t large yet.

  “Year ago, maybe year and a half, these rats tried to move in. Wanted to get a shakedown going. I knew it and some of the others. Some of the boys they fooled—got ’em believing I was too old for the job, not tough enough with the bosses. That sort of crap. Trouble was, they didn’t get enough of ’em thinking that. So they pull this frame.”

  A shortage appeared in the union funds. Halpern did not deny that; he admitted he could not put his finger on the men responsible. He admitted, too, that they had made it look bad. “Looked like I’d been milking the fund. Misappropriation of union funds, they call it. Grand larceny, the indictment says. They hang it on me, they get me out, they take over.”

  Forbes Ingraham was representing Halpern. He had men going into it. He—

  “Wait a minute,” Weigand said. “Why Ingraham? It’s out of his line. Didn’t you know that?”

  Halpern had not, he said, known anything about Forbes Ingraham, one way or another—not at first. Ingraham had got in touch with him, indirectly. “First I thought he was just a shyster. Kind of ambulance chaser, like the fellow says.” But he had asked around; learned of the status of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb, gone to see Ingraham.

  “Figured when I saw the setup it was way out of line for us. Where’d we get that kind of money?”

  But he had talked to Forbes Ingraham. And, he had been told to forget about the fee.

  “Seems like he just didn’t like rats,” Halpern said. “Said New York was his town and he didn’t want rats taking it over, and you had to start somewhere. Funny sort of guy, wasn’t he?”

  “No fee at all?”

  “That was his idea. I couldn’t see it that way, so he says, all right, we could make it a hundred bucks.”

  “He was getting places?”

  But Matthew Halpern shook his big, gray head at that. He said, “Nope,” to that.

  “You mean he wasn’t?”

  “What I mean, captain—why tell you if he was? See what I mean? These guys are in the rackets. So, they got protection. I don’t say anything about you—far’s I know you’re an honest cop. But—you see how it is. If we got anything, we wouldn’t want to tip anybody, would we?”

  “I think you’re making a mistake, Mr. Halpern.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mr. Ingraham’s dead.”

  “Yeah. The firm ain’t, is it? I don’t know where I stand, but could be we can pick up the pieces.”

  “If the pieces are around, these ‘rats’ you think killed Ingraham didn’t get anywhere, did they?”

  “Listen,” Halpern said. “I don’t know who killed Ingraham. Maybe some babe got jealous. All I know is what I was doing there. That’s what you wanted to know, ain’t it.”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “O.K. I got there about eleven, maybe a few minutes after. This dame went in to tell Ingraham I was there and comes running out, saying he’s hurt. I left. I wasn’t out of that place you wait in.”

  “Not then,” Bill said.

  Halpern looked at him.

  “Mr. Ingraham probably was dead when you went in,” Bill Weigand told him. “Probably had been for fifteen minutes or so.”

  Halpern stood up behind the desk. He was a very big man; he had been a powerful one. He still was powerful enough.

  “You getting at something?” he asked, and the rasp was rougher in his voice.

  “There is another way into the offices,” Weigand said. “You didn’t know that, Mr. Halpern?”

  “Through the—” Halpern began, and stopped.

  “Right,” Bill said. “Through the other office-the one Mr. Schaeffer occupied before his death. You did know about that, apparently.”

  “All right,” Halpern said. “Sure. We went back there one evening—Ingraham and me—to look at some stuff I’d—to look at some stuff. He took me in what he called the back way.” The stub of the cigar moved in powerful teeth. “So what?” Halpern asked.

  Bill Weigand stood up then. He said he didn’t know what. Except what was obvious. He supposed obvious to Mr. Halpern. Whoever killed Forbes Ingraham could have got to him through the other office. So—being in the reception room when his body was found didn’t mean anything.

  “You want to pin this on me?”

  “On whoever did it, Mr. Halpern.”

  Halpern glared at him, and was advised to take it easy.

  “You got it wrong,” Halpern said. “Maybe that’s the way you want to get it? Maybe these rats are pals of yours?”

  “No,” Bill said. “Not of mine, Mr. Halpern. No killer is.”

  “O.K.,” Halpern said. “That sounds swell, captain. Why’d I want to knock Ingraham off? We was working together to get these rats. So—how do you figure?”

  “I don’t,” Bill said. “Not yet. But I don’t know what he found out, do I?”

  Halpern waited. His face was very red, angry.

  “It could be,” Bill Weigand said, “that he found out the wrong thing. Not what he was supposed to find ou
t. Since he was your attorney, it would have been confidential, under the rules. But you didn’t know him very well, you say. Maybe—”

  “Listen,” Halpern said, and spoke very loudly. “You going to take me in?”

  Weigand shook his head.

  “Then suppose you get the hell out of here,” Halpern said.

  The office was Halpern’s. Weigand left him in it.

  IV

  Tuesday, 5:55 P.M. to 7:25 P.M.

  It was not to be the four of them, not as Phoebe James seemed to mean. Jerry had tried to make that clear; he went to pains to make it clearer. Murder was for the police, not for amateurs. They, he and Pam, were not even amateurs. They were bystanders. If they sometimes got involved, it was as bystanders.

  “Well—” Pam said, slowly.

  Jerry shook his head at her. There was no “well” about it. If, as bystanders, they happened on anything that might help, they took what they had happened on to the police—specifically, to Bill Weigand. They always had, always would. He looked at Pamela.

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Always. Nothing behind anybody’s back.”

  “You trust this Weigand,” Phoebe James said. She looked at Nan Schaeffer. She said, “They know him, Nan. Perhaps we—” She waited. She seemed to hand the decision to the younger woman.

  Nan Schaeffer absently stroked the mink which lay softly on the arm of her chair. It was as if, Pam North thought, she expected response, perhaps a purr. But minks do not purr. That much, at any rate, Pam knew of them.

  “I don’t know,” Nan Schaeffer said, finally. “If only Sam—” She shook her head. There was uncertainty on regular features, to which, Pam thought, uncertainty was commonly a stranger. “Sam would know what we ought to do.”

  She looked up from the coat, at the Norths. “There’s no use saying that,” she said. “Sam isn’t here. Forbes isn’t here.” She paused again. “Forbes wasn’t going to the police,” she said. “He was going beyond them, to the district attorney. Mr. Sumner. He didn’t trust the police. Not in a thing like this.”

  She sat with her chin up; she challenged them. Phoebe James glanced at the Norths; then turned toward Nan, her expression intent.

  “I talked to him yesterday,” she said. “Yesterday afternoon. After you left the office, before we all met at Margaret’s. You saw me there. When you went out, I was in—”

  “Yes,” Jerry said.

  “You’ll listen?”

  They would listen; of course they would listen. With the understanding that—

  “Oh,” Nan Schaeffer said, “without prejudice. You’ve made that clear, Mr. North.” She took a cigarette from a case, leaned forward to a lighter flame Jerry held for her; breathed smoke deeply, and exhaled it high in the air. “Forbes was preoccupied. I think he was worried about this—you’ve told them, Phoebe?”

  “About Matthew Halpern,” Phoebe James said. “A little. I—I wanted them to hear you tell it.”

  “He’d found out it was bigger than he’d thought it was,” Nan Schaeffer said. “At least, I think so. He didn’t come straight out. He often didn’t, you know. You knew him that well?”

  “Yes,” Jerry North said.

  “And of course, he couldn’t. Mr. Halpern was his client, so ethics came into it. But—”

  She had gone to see Forbes Ingraham the previous afternoon, at his suggestion. They talked, she said, about her late husband’s estate, of which Ingraham was an executor. They talked about sums still due the estate from the firm, which Schaeffer and Ingraham had founded together years before.

  “Things like that,” she said. “Business things. I kept saying that I didn’t have to know, wouldn’t really understand, that he should make any decision that had to be made. But he said I had to be told—that now I had to listen. So, I tried to. It’s all—I’m afraid it doesn’t seem very important to me.”

  “It should,” Phoebe James told her, in the manner of one to whom such things were highly important. She shook her head, smiling faintly.

  “I know,” Nan Schaeffer said. “You’re always telling me but—it’s different for you. I’m no good at things like that. Anyway—”

  Anyway, she had done her best to listen, and listened to the end. Then, when Forbes Ingraham finished, the animation which had been in his face as he sought words to simplify financial matters for the comprehension of his partner’s widow—“I think it interested him. It was a kind of challenge”—then the animation died out. “And he looked worried,” Nan Schaeffer said. “As if something which was worrying him had come back. I asked him what was the matter.”

  At first he said that nothing was the matter. “The way men do, when there is; when they don’t want to worry you.” Then he said that the Halpern matter had got rather sticky.

  “That was the word he used. ‘Sticky.’ I said I was sorry, and was it anything he wanted to talk about? He said I ought to know better than that; that I’d been enough with lawyers to know better than that. There was nothing to talk about. It was all—what do they say. Sub something?”

  “Rosa,” Pam North said.

  “Judice?” Jerry North said.

  “That’s it,” Nan Schaeffer said, and nodded her head at Jerry. “Not to be talked about with outsiders. But then he said, ‘There’s more to it than I figured at first. Not as simple as I thought.’ And then something about having to take it to the district attorney.”

  “Take what?” Pam asked.

  Nan Schaeffer did not know, she told them. Something about the Halpern case. Something that worried Forbes Ingraham.

  “That’s all you remember?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Except—”

  Her appointment had been Forbes Ingraham’s last, at the office, of the day before. When they had finished, he had gone out with her. They had gone out “the back way.”

  The Norths shook their heads. They had not heard of the back way. Nan Schaeffer explained.

  At the door which led from Schaeffer’s former office to the rear corridor, Ingraham had reached around Nan Schaeffer, she told them. He had taken the knob and started, to open the door and then had said, “Wait a minute,” and, instead of opening the door for her to precede him, had stepped in front of her, opened the door slowly, and then, without stepping through the door, but rather by peering around it, had looked up and down the corridor. Then he had gone into the corridor and let her follow him.

  “You thought—” Jerry said.

  “He thought somebody might be there. I felt that, anyway.”

  But there had been no one. Ingraham had closed the door after them, and tried the knob, making certain the door was locked. Then they had gone out, through the “twin” building—“the Siamese twins, Sam used to call them”—and he had put her in a cab. She had gone home.

  “That is,” she said. “What I call that. To the East Plaza—the hotel I’m staying at since—” She looked away from them. “Well,” she said, “that’s it.”

  But it was not all of it.

  “Forbes came here, then,” Phoebe James said. “He—” She stopped for a moment. “We had a cup of tea and he freshened up and then we went to Margaret’s. And—it’s true he seemed worried. Not like himself. Preoccupied.”

  “About the Halpern case?” Jerry asked.

  Just perceptibly, Phoebe James shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask—didn’t ask anything. He was tired, I thought, and when he was tired—If there was something he wanted to tell me, he would. I—I never questioned him.” She smiled, and seemed to be remembering. “I didn’t need to, really,” she said. “When he was worried I knew, of course, but it was the way he felt that mattered. Not why he felt that way. We—we never hurried each other. Only if it was something which might be, or come to be, or seem to be, a—an impingement. Like poor little Phyllis or—” And then the softly beautiful voice died out. “I didn’t mean to say that,” she said, after a little. “I’m afraid I was talking to myself.”

 
; “Anyway,” Nan Schaeffer said, “that hasn’t anything to do with it.” She paused. “How could it have?”

  “You don’t know what we’re talking about, do you?” Phoebe James said to the Norths. “I suppose—well, I suppose you’d better. You know the girl at the office—the blond girl, very pretty. Very—young?” She paused again. “So very young,” she said. “Not half his age. Or mine. Oh—or mine.”

  She was silent for some seconds; sat with her head bent, so that the light accentuated the white streak in her brown hair. She looked her age then, Pam North thought; before, she had seemed without age.

  “She fell in love with Forbes,” Phoebe James said, without looking up, looking at the light on her hands, at a large, carved ring on the little finger of her left hand. “Or thought she did. When I was her age, it would have been called a crush, perhaps. I don’t know what they call it now. He was—to a young woman, he must have seemed so much. Experienced, successful—complete, as young men aren’t. Or most of them aren’t.” She shook her head. “I’ve written that, too,” she said. “More than once. The dewy girl enamored of the older man. Mine always go back to the boy, of course. Youth calls to youth. Perhaps youth doesn’t answer sometimes, but—” She paused. “I don’t try to teach old readers new tricks,” she said.

  “Anyway—”

  Anyway, the girl Phyllis had fallen in love with, or become enamored of, the older man. The older man had not reciprocated. They would think—oh, that she would have thought that; would have made herself think that, truth or not; would have been told that. They would think her naive. “But I’m not,” Phoebe James said. “Oh, not for a long time.”

  But the situation had been, nevertheless, a mildly uncomfortable one for Forbes Ingraham. The girl was efficient; she was also a very “nice” girl. “He called her that.” He could have discharged her. “But that wouldn’t have been fair. He thought it wouldn’t.” So, he had temporized—limited his contacts with her as much as he could without raising an issue; used Dorothy Lynch, particularly after Schaeffer’s death, instead of Phyllis Moore.

  Mrs. James deviated, here. They were not to think that Forbes had been strait-laced. There had been girls in the past. “Before we—” She did not finish. But they had not been girls working in the office. Such relationships, aside from everything else, were complications. And, she thought—thought he had thought—a little vulgar. “Although why, I don’t know,” she said. “And anyway—” She stopped again. She did not, she said, know why she was telling all this, since it was so far from the point. But—there had been a further complication. Francis Cuyler—“the tall dark man at the office; the rather dramatic man?”—apparently felt about Phyllis as Phyllis did about Forbes Ingraham. Youth calling to youth again. In this case, apparently not being answered. At least—