Murder Is Served

by Frances Lockridge

  Bill said he saw what Leonard was driving at. He waited for Leonard to go on, thinking this tall, angular professor was a subtle man, and might be driving at a number of things. It would be interesting to see how far he drove.

  “My sister had this—weakness,” Leonard said. “As surely as if she had been unsteady on her feet, as if her heart had been weak. It didn’t show, none of us knew it. There was no reason why Mott should have known it.” He looked beyond Weigand for a moment. “None of us precisely understands that sort of thing,” he said. “The psychiatrists don’t, altogether. A kind of mental unsteadiness, a kind of weakness. Not of what we usually mean by the mind, the logical faculty, the ability to learn. Anita had those, rather unusually. It’s a—well, a kind of weak ness of the being, of the ego. If, philosophically, we can say—” He broke off, looked at Bill Weigand, shook his head in deprecation. “My hobby horse,” he said. “I go astray, professorially. The only point that is apposite is that Anita had this weakness, we didn’t know it—and any one of a dozen things, a hundred things for all we know, might have broken her. It happened to be Mott, her love for Mott. And Mott pushed as, because he was callous, unimaginative, he might have pushed anyone. Naturally, I think his action was reprehensible. But the results were disproportionate.”

  “You saw this then?” Bill said.

  Leonard shook his long head and said, “Oh, no.”

  “Not at once,” he said. “I was very fond of the kid. She was the family baby, of course. That may have had something to do with it, incidentally. Our parents’ age when she was born, the sheltering she may have had as the baby. But no one knows. No, I wasn’t so detached at the start. Perhaps I hated Mott then, wanted him hurt.” He paused, looked at Bill and smiled. “But,” he said, “he wasn’t hurt then, was he? And now I feel only as I’ve said.”

  Bill said it was interesting. He said, “Of course, if it hadn’t been Mott, this incident, she might have escaped altogether? Outgrown this—weakness?”

  Leonard shrugged bony shoulders. He did not look directly at Bill Weigand. He said nobody could know about that.

  “A possibility,” Bill said. “You realize that?”

  Leonard nodded. He said there were many possibilities. Then, as if he had thought more carefully, he made a negative motion of his head.

  “Actually,” he said, “I doubt it very much. From her condition now. The weakness must have been very great. I was out to see her a week or so ago. She didn’t recognize me.”

  “Then the chances—?” Bill said.

  “All right,” Leonard said. “Perhaps I was palliating her condition there at first. One does—I don’t know why. I don’t think there’s much chance. I did for a time, but this last visit—” He did not finish that. Bill waited, wondering if he would finish it, if he realized what might be made of what he had said. Apparently he did not. He looked at Bill Weigand with an expression which said the whole matter was finished off, disposed of. He asked if Bill were sure he wouldn’t have a drink.

  “Thanks,” Bill said. “No.” He watched Leonard’s face become, again and suddenly, attentive. Bill realized that there must have been something in his voice.

  “Did you telephone Mott yesterday morning?” Bill said. He spoke quickly, hurrying it.

  “Did I—what—I—” Leonard had not expected that. Bill did not repeat the question.

  “What makes you think I did,” Leonard asked.

  Bill shook his head. “Just, did you?” he said. “It ought to be easy, Mr. Leonard.”

  You reached in a dark room, pushed where there ought to be a door, and a door opened. It was surprising, gratifying. There was no reason why Leonard should appreciate how surprising it was.

  “You find things out,” Leonard said. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Leonard waited a moment before he answered. He seemed to be pulling it together in his own mind.

  “This term paper Peggy Mott wrote,” Leonard said, and spoke slowly, still pulling it together. “The Norths told you about it, I think?” Bill nodded. “It worried me,” Leonard said. “More than I admitted, because—well, I knew more than I admitted, I suppose. I’d talked to Mrs. Mott a few times, run into her at the coffee bar in the bookshop, that sort of thing. I didn’t connect her with Tony Mott at first; she was just a ‘Miss’ Mott, as far as I knew. And—well, I took her to dinner once or twice. It’s not supposed to happen between male members of the faculty and female students. I don’t mean that anything did happen, you understand.” He looked directly at Weigand. Bill thought he had rather unusually red lips.

  “She’s a very pretty girl, of course,” Leonard said, as if he were explaining something. “But I merely took her to dinner once or twice. I found out who she was, and something about her and Mott. That was before they had actually separated. Last spring some time. This last fall, in one way and another, I picked up other things. One does, you know. You couldn’t miss her and Carey, for example. And I heard—I’ve forgotten who told me—that she and Mott were separated and that Mott was—behaving badly. Call it putting obstacles in their way, hers and Carey’s. You know?”

  Bill nodded.

  “Then I get this paper,” Leonard said. “This—this hymn of hate. Under the circumstances, it worried me. Normally, it mightn’t have. Students write rather remarkable things, sometimes. But I was worried, knowing something about the Motts, and I suppose that’s why, actually, I took it up with the Norths, asked them to pass it on to you. I thought that would—well, eliminate my sense of responsibility. You understand?”

  Bill nodded again.

  “Well, it didn’t completely,” Leonard said. “It—the sense of being responsible—kept coming back, nagging at me. So I called Mott up and—well, warned him. It seems silly, now.”

  “It worked?” Weigand asked.

  Leonard shrugged.

  “In a way,” he said. “Obviously not very effectively if—” He broke off. “It got me over my conscience,” he went on. “As a matter of fact, Mott just laughed at me. But that didn’t matter. I’d warned him. I didn’t expect him to be much concerned. Obviously, I had nothing definite to warn him against except—well, Peggy’s state of mind. I even felt rather foolish, old maidish, warning him at all, after I’d started.” He stopped, and waited.

  “About what time was this?” Bill asked him. “This call?”

  “Eleven. Eleven-fifteen.”

  “You didn’t identify yourself to anyone? The switchboard operator?”

  Leonard shook his head. He stopped shaking it and looked hard at Weigand.

  “By the way,” he said, “how did you get on to it?”

  Bill shook his head this time, indicating it did not matter. It would be naive to mention a push in the dark at a door which only might exist.

  “You didn’t think of mentioning it to us?” Bill asked.

  Leonard shook his head.

  “Look, Lieutenant,” he said, “why stick my neck out?” His tone indicated quotation marks around the phrase.

  “Considering Anita,” Bill Weigand filled in.

  “Obviously,” Leonard said. “Even a sheltered university professor, Lieutenant—” He did not finish it, or need to.

  It was reasonable. An innocent man, however conscious of innocence, would prefer not to arouse unwarranted suspicion; would avoid “sticking his neck out,” even if not particularly afraid for his neck. Still—Bill Weigand considered what he had learned, while Leonard waited. The telephone conversation, even if its content were actually as described by Leonard, served one other and obvious purpose. It established for Leonard that Mott was at his office. It would have been easy enough for Leonard to have established, further, that Mott planned to remain there for an hour or so. Leonard might have offered to drop down and show Mott his wife’s “hymn of hate.” Once at the office, Leonard might have sung his own.

  “By the way, Mr. Leonard,” Bill said, “have you eaten at the Maillaux place?”

  Leonard seem
ed surprised by this. He nodded at once. He said, “Often,” telling Bill what he wanted to know. Leonard would not, if he had been there often, need to fumble through a search for Mott’s office. But—

  “Recently?” Bill asked.

  This time Leonard shook his head.

  “Not so much recently,” he said. “Once or twice since they remodelled. A little too rich for my blood, now. And for my salary. Not that it wasn’t always. But they used to make it up to you, in the old days—no hurry, not so many people climbing over you, just rather remarkable food.”

  “Not that way now?” Bill said.

  “For my taste, no. Just another first-rate place now. But I wouldn’t tell old André that.”

  “No,” Bill said. “Naturally.”

  Leonard was at ease now comfortably talking irrelevancies. It was not the time, Bill decided, to press for more. He thanked Leonard, again refused a proffered drink, went out and down to his car. He drove by his apartment; Dorian was surrounded by Sunday newspapers, smoking but not in flames. She came out of them eagerly, looked at Bill’s face and was depressed. “You’ve got to go back?” she said. Bill nodded. “We were going to the Norths for drinks and somewhere to eat,” she said. “Is that out?” Bill didn’t know; he would call her. He showered and shaved, changed and looked longingly at his bed; held Dorian briefly and said again he would call her. He went on to the office, and found that Mullins was still sitting on it, and that it was quiet.

  “Amateurs are hard to catch, Loot,” Mullins said. “A couple of pros, now, you’d know where to look. Amateurs’ll go anywhere.” He was mildly resentful. “With pros you know where you are,” Mullins said. “The Norths telephoned.” The connection in Mullins’s mind was so obvious, so immediate, that Bill grinned suddenly.

  “Yeah,” Mullins said, “talk as if they had something, Mr. North did. But he didn’t say what.”

  Bill Weigand made agreeing noises, but he had only half listened. Probably Jerry was checking on their cocktail engagement. Bill sent Mullins to lunch and sat on it himself.

  He was no longer so impatient at the slowness of the machine in turning up Peggy Mott and Weldon Carey. It occurred to him that he was no longer, in any real sense, ready for them. This would be a blow to Inspector O’Malley.

  10

  SUNDAY, 3:40 P.M. TO 4:45 P.M.

  Bill Weigand’s mind was tired; he drank coffee, put spurs to his mind, and it responded sluggishly. His mind told him, dully, that things were in balance; that there was no obvious way to unbalance them. Leonard equalled Peggy Mott; Peggy Mott equalled Leonard. That was the size of it, the rough size of it.

  There was more against Peggy, and it was cleaner. But there was enough against Leonard to mar the case against the girl. The elemental clarity which it had seemed to have, the clarity of which O’Malley so much approved, was irretrievably ruined. Ruined subjectively, because Bill himself was no longer sure; ruined objectively, because as it stood he doubted whether the district attorney would take it. Not, particularly, with Peggy looking as she did; not with the sympathy with which, authentically enough, she would be regarded, and which any clever lawyer would artfully augment. The district attorney would not want to take it to a jury, knowing that the defense would present an alternative. They lacked, by much, enough to convict Leonard of anything. But there was enough against him, unexplained, to prevent their conviction of Peggy, once the defense got hold of it. And the defense would get hold of it. Bill Weigand’s tired mind went slower and slower around in this trap.

  A jury would be looking for a chance to let Peggy off. That was inevitable. Bill Weigand, drumming his desk with the fingers of his right hand, wondered irritably whether he were not as impressionable as a jury. It was possible he was creating difficulties. Wearily, he went back to Leonard, trying to break the balance.

  Leonard denied hating Mott, and was convincing enough. His attitude could be as reasoned, as dispassionate as he described it. But, obviously, it did not have to be. Leonard, for all Weigand could be certain of, was a violent man at bottom, an emotional one. The lower part of his face, the full red lips, suggested the possibility. He might have felt for a long time as he said he felt about Mott; then have visited his young sister, whom clearly he loved, and realized, with a new hopelessness, what had happened to her. “She didn’t recognize me.” She was evidently deteriorating. The deterioration might be enough to come as a new shock, engender a new bitterness.

  He had telephoned Mott on the morning of the day Mott died; he could have gone to the office afterward. He could have killed Mott. He could have faked the attack on himself. (Bill had always counted that as a possibility.) Could he have killed Elaine Britton? Bill rummaged through reports. Setting Elaine’s murder at the latest hour, he could, apparently. He had been bandaged, sent home, some time after five o’clock the afternoon before. Nobody had taken him home, was sure he arrived there. He could as easily have gone to Central Park West. Why? There was no telling, at the moment; perhaps Elaine Britton had seen him, too. It was not certain.

  We didn’t go far enough, Bill thought. It was too easy; it was handed us on a platter.

  If Peggy Mott was not guilty, it had been handed them on a platter, Bill realized. They had bungled; they had merely been too innocent, too naive. The apparent facts were sufficiently substantial but they had not gone far enough underneath to see what was holding them up. If Peggy Mott was innocent, the real murderer was holding them up. He had, to some degree, created them. Mrs. Peggy Mott had been very neatly, very expertly, framed. Or she was a killer. In no case was the evidence against her accidental, or the result of misinterpretation.

  And, Bill thought with his tired mind, Leonard was the one who first brought her into it. He was the one who started it. Bill checked over, one by one, the things which must have been done if Peggy Mott were a victim, not a killer. Nobody could have made her write the essay on hatred. He stopped himself. Conceivably, of course, someone could have suggested it to her; said something like, “I know how you feel. Write it. Get it out of your mind.” For all Bill Weigand knew, that might be sound psychology. It was interesting that Leonard was a psychologist.

  But it was not necessary to suppose that Peggy Mott had been worked upon and proved suggestible. Things did not need to be that perfect. It was more likely, if you wanted to build a case against Leonard, that he had seized an opportunity he had not created. Getting the essay from the girl, he had seen a way to use it. He had got in touch with the Norths, planted suspicion, paved the way. He had, if this was correct, two victims: one primary, the other cynically chosen for purposes of his own safety. (And the essay might have been the germ of the whole plan, of the murder itself.) His next step would have been to pick a place and a time. Hence his telephone call to Mott, at Mott’s office; hence, presumably, an appointment with Mott for, say, eleven forty-five. With that done, he would telephone Peggy Mott, pretend to be Mott—a little mimicry would be required, but Leonard, as a university lecturer, was a trained speaker—and make an appointment with her, at the office, for noon. (If she were not at her apartment when he called, the whole thing could be postponed. But she had been.)

  So far it added. Too well, Bill thought, a little gloomily. He was building up a hard case, tearing down an easy one. O’Malley would disapprove. Bill himself disapproved. But it began to look as if, going into court with their case against Peggy Mott and this case against Leonard not broken down, they would as Leonard had said, be sticking their necks out.

  Bill kept on adding. So, minutes before Peggy was due for her appointment, Leonard showed up for his. Presumably he had taken his own weapon, opportunistically switched to the knife which apparently had lain ready on Mott’s desk. He killed Mott. Presumably he had entered from the street, not through the restaurant, and had gone out the same way. Obviously, he might have been seen. (Had he been? Another thing to dig for.) But you cannot murder without taking certain chances. (He had had to take a chance that Peggy would show up for her
appointment before Mott’s body was found, but that was not so crucial. Involving the girl was merely a special safeguard, not his only safety. And if he timed it right, his chances were excellent to involve her.)

  After that, Leonard must have waited for the newspapers. They said nothing about Peggy Mott’s presence at the scene, which merely made it certain that she had not found, and reported, the body. That would have been encouraging; knowing that a background of suspicion against her was already in existence, the girl would have been apt to do what she said she had done: look and run. Leonard would still not know whether she had actually gone to the office. But he would have enough to go ahead on, and, when the later editions of the afternoon papers reported, guardedly, that Mott’s pretty wife was being sought for questioning, he would have felt he had more.

  Then what had he done? Reported the theft of the essay from his office, leaving the police to draw the obvious inference. Faked an attack on himself, to make the inference even more obvious. (Who else but Peggy Mott had anything to gain by theft or attack?) So far you could make it hang together. But then came the murder of Elaine Britton, and that did not fit. Did the case against Leonard fail on that point? Bill looked at it and began to suspect that it did. At first glance, it fitted perfectly—an additional, ruthlessly created, piece of evidence against Peggy Mott. But, Leonard could not have known that, because he did not know that Elaine Britton had put Peggy at the scene. At least, Bill Weigand did not see how Leonard could have known that since it had not been published. (The fact of Elaine’s murder had been printed that morning, and printed large. But the police had not connected it with Mott’s murder, and the newspapers, hurried to make editions, had not independently dug a connection up. They would have it by now, but there were no papers until the first editions of the mornings.) It would be difficult to fit the murder of the slim show-girl into the plot against Peggy.