But neither of them looked as if they minded being wet and cold. They looked as if they were very warm and contented. From the expression on their faces, they might have been sitting in front of a fire. Actually, Pam North thought, they are. In the only sense that makes much difference.
11
TUESDAY, 9:30 P.M. TO 10:45 P.M.
They came down to the fire one by one. Dan Gordon came first, and put logs on it and stirred it, so it leaped up brightly. Then Debbie came, in a pale blue slack suit, and walked into his arms. After a moment they sat down very close together on one of the sofas. He kept one arm around her. With the other hand he turned her face to him and gravely examined it. He told her she looked as if she had been playing with a cat. His voice was light, confident, and she smiled at him without answering.
Jerry North came next, in tweeds made for Dan Gordon and perceptibly long in the leg. He went over to the fire and stood in front of it and held out his hands. Then he turned and held out his back. Then, when Dan Gordon waved without comment, Jerry went to a portable bar and mixed himself a drink. He looked at the two on the sofa and they nodded, so he made more drinks. Then Pam came in, in a borrowed hostess coat—white with gold embroidery—and said, “me, too.” So Jerry mixed a fourth drink. He took the drinks to Debbie and Dan; he took his own drink and Pam’s—and Pam herself—and moved all firmly to the other sofa. He sat down and sighed. He looked at Pam, whose hair was wet and improbably curly. She nodded and said, “All right. Except for the shoulder. I landed on it.” She paused, considering. “Again,” she said.
Larry Westcott came next, and he had not changed; his tweeds looked wet; he brought an odor of wet wool with him. He stopped at a little distance and looked at them and said, “They’ve taken him along?”
“The State cops,” Dan Gordon said. “Yes—they’ve taken him along. Not talking any more, they say.”
Westcott said “Oh,” vaguely. “I’ll be getting along home, then,” he said. He started toward the hall door. “By the way,” he said, “Eve won’t be down again. The kid’s scared—the storm and everything. Eve said to tell you, Debbie.”
“All right,” Debbie said, without moving in Dan’s arms.
Westcott went into the hall. There he spoke to someone. Then they heard a door close, and then Bill Weigand came in, with Mullins after him. They came across to the fire.
“Storm’s over,” Bill said. “Moon’s out.” He looked at them. “We ought to be getting along,” he said. But he showed no immediate intention of getting along.
“A drink first,” Debbie said, still without moving. “You and the sergeant?”
“O.K.,” Mullins said. “O.K., Miss Brooks.”
He went to the bar. He looked at Weigand, who nodded. He made drinks. He brought them back. Bill Weigand—in slacks and a sweater he had borrowed somewhere—stood in front of the fire. He drank and put his glass on the mantelpiece. He looked at Pam.
“All right, Pam,” he said. “Say it.”
“I told you so,” Pam said, sweetly. “All along I told you so.” She paused. “Only,” she said, “I couldn’t fit it together, which was what counted.” She regarded Bill. “No help, I wasn’t,” she said.
Bill Weigand drank again. He put the glass back. He said he hadn’t been any too bright himself. His face was shadowed.
“Not bright enough to save the nurse,” he said. “Barely bright enough to help save you, Miss Brooks. I did all the things he expected me to do, right up to the end. Until the tall man died. Which he couldn’t have counted on, since the card didn’t show. Just a name—and a pair of eyes—the card was.” He paused, considering. He seemed disinclined to go on.
“We all did what he wanted us to do,” Pam said. “Including Debbie. Running out in the rain, that way.”
Bill nodded. He said, “Right.
“Including Debbie,” he said. “Whom he had to get when his luck started to run out.”
“Did he really see somebody out there?” Debbie said. “Before he went out? Or did he just pretend to?”
Nickerson Smith wasn’t saying, Bill told her. He wasn’t saying anything. So they had, still, to guess about a good deal of it. But, as a guess—“no, Smith didn’t see anybody when he looked through the living-room window, out into the rain.
“He wanted you to think he saw Dan,” Bill said. “He wanted you to think Dan was running somewhere, out there in the rain—and that he was hurt. You said he talked about the man’s staggering.”
“He said he seemed to be staggering,” Debbie said.
Bill nodded.
“Right,” he said. “Creating anxiety. Then he ran out, taking Westcott with him. Hoping we could blame Westcott for what was going to happen. Then he lost Westcott in the rain—and yelled and fired a shot. At nothing—at the air. To bring you.”
Debbie nodded. “It brought me,” she said. She looked up at Dan. “I didn’t stop to think,” she said. “I just—I was just—afraid.”
“I know,” Dan said. “You were just afraid.”
His voice was very tender.
“So,” Bill said. “He got you out—where it could be anyone. Where, after we found you, we’d think it could be anyone. Westcott. Dan, even. Or—anybody. It might have worked.” He drank again. “The whole damn thing might have worked,” he said, a little angrily. “And it was all there in front of us—spread out. And we didn’t put it together.”
“Finally you did,” Pam said. “In time.”
Not in time for Grace Spencer, Bill told her, and again his voice was bitter.
“How did he kill her?” Jerry said. “Why, for that matter?”
It was one of the things they would have to guess, Bill told him. He managed, in the darkness—after Debbie had turned out the lights to give Dan a chance to run. “And that was a damn fool thing to do,” Bill interpolated. Smith managed to, somehow, entice her out onto the terrace. Presumably she had come out to talk to him; presumably she had remembered something and was giving him a chance to explain. But what she remembered—
“We won’t know,” Bill said. “Unless he decides to tell us. She remembered something that didn’t fit. Presumably, when he was impersonating the doctor. Some gesture—some movement. Perhaps merely enough to make her doubt that it was really the doctor coming out. Perhaps not enough to make her realize that the man in the white coat was Smith. But—if we once suspected, he was in for it. He knew that. It had to be—perfect. Accepted as perfect. Otherwise—well, we’d all have thought what Pam thought.”
“Step by step,” Pam said, after a pause. “What did he do? What can you prove?”
Bill said he thought they could prove enough. As much as they needed to. Because, once they got around the alibi, he was always the likely one.
“As he no doubt realized,” Bill said. “He had motive. The only good motive. He was around. Only—he couldn’t do it. He thought we wouldn’t break that down. He didn’t care how much we suspected him as long as we couldn’t break that down. But—step by step—”
First, he had—they were just breaking it down to details—stolen a large part of the fund for which he and Dr. Gordon were trustees. “We say he stole it,” Bill said. “Perhaps he merely wasted it.” But he was the one who had diverted the money from Dan, not Dr. Gordon. Gordon was the one who had left things to his cotrustee, not Smith. But—as the time came to pay the money over to Dan, Gordon asked for an accounting. Purely routine, probably. But Smith couldn’t stand even a routine accounting. Possibly he had underestimated Gordon; possibly he had thought he would never have to explain. Perhaps he had always been ready to kill Gordon if it became necessary.
Then—he decided it had become necessary. Killing Gordon would serve two purposes. It would stop the investigation into the fund. It would give Smith a dead man to blame the loss on. But his motives were as obvious as they were compelling. He would have to move carefully. He did.
“Somehow, he got hold of one of the referral cards in Gordon’s office,”
Bill said. “Oakes’s card, by what turned out, for him, to be bad luck. I suppose Oakes had been in before and the card hadn’t been returned. Probably it was on Miss Spencer’s desk.”
Bill looked at Debbie, who nodded.
“Yesterday morning,” Debbie said. “It was the morning group he was in, not the afternoon. I remember him, of course. Anybody would.”
Weigand nodded.
“Because he was so tall,” Weigand said. “So odd. If he had been, as the chances were he would be, just an ordinary man you wouldn’t have remembered, I imagine. As Smith, of course, assumed you wouldn’t. Neither you nor Miss Spencer. He would have been just a name—hardly that.”
“A number,” Debbie said. “More a number than a name. A man in one of the rooms. No. 2, in his case.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “That’s what Smith counted on. He slipped in after the doctor went to the hospital, while you were at your desk and Miss Spencer was—where was she?”
“In the storeroom, most of the time,” Debbie said.
“Skipped in and got one of the morning cards,” Bill said. “They were done with and filed; they wouldn’t be checked for days; with the doctor dead they would probably never be checked.”
Pam North thought of something.
“Why one of the morning cards?” she said. “Why not—oh, a card from last week. Because then there wouldn’t be even a slight chance of somebody remembering.”
Bill Weigand shook his head.
“Because he knew we would talk to the men,” he said. “He could assume we would be rather careless about it, because they didn’t have anything to do with the murder; couldn’t have, as long as we thought Dr. Gordon was alive after he had finished with them and gone out. But—he could be pretty sure somebody would be going around, just as a matter of routine, to ask Oakes and the rest if they had been at the office yesterday and if they had noticed anything out of the way. So it had to be somebody who was there yesterday.”
“He took the chance,” Jerry pointed out, “that your man would be specific—would say ‘Were you at the doctor’s office yesterday afternoon.’”
Bill nodded. He said that all murderers had to take some chances. He smiled suddenly and turned to Pam.
“What did you say to them?” he asked suddenly. “Yesterday? Yesterday afternoon?”
“Yesterday,” Pam said. “I—I knew it was in the afternoon. We all did.” She paused. “Thought we did,” she added.
Bill said, “Right.” He said Smith could count on that; had counted on it; would have been, a hundred times to one, safe in counting on it. So—Smith stole the card. He put on dark glasses, slicked his hair down.
“Why?” Pam said.
“Because Dr. Gordon did,” Bill told her. “Because—Smith usually looked like a brush, Pam. Remember? And, of course, also to look less like himself. It worked both ways.”
Pam nodded.
With dark glasses, with hair slicked down, in an unnoticeable dark suit, Smith had shown up at the office with the other compensation cases. The nurse and Debbie barely knew him by sight; there was hardly a chance they would recognize him behind the dark glasses, and they had not. He had come early, no doubt hoping to be the first. That would have made it a little easier. Actually, he was the second; Fritz Weber was even more prompt.
“That poor little man,” Pam said. “That poor little man.”
So Smith, posing as Oakes, had got in the second room, not the first. But that wasn’t too bad. He got in the second room and waited—with the heavy, spherical base of a table cigarette lighter in his pocket. And, when Dr. Gordon finished examining Weber, when he came into the second room, Smith killed him. Probably he had stood inside the door and had struck Gordon just as the door closed behind him—while the oculist was still looking around an apparently empty room.
He made sure that Weber had left the first room; he could hear him as he left. Then he dragged Gordon’s body back through the first room, into the private office and into the desk chair.
“Gordon’s body was heavy,” Bill said. “But Smith is strong.”
“He sure as hell is,” Dan Gordon said, reflectively.
Smith took a chance of being seen as he took the body through the first examining room, as Weber had left the door open.
“You might have seen him,” Bill said to Debbie, but she shook her head.
“Not unless I leaned over the desk and tried to,” she said. “Not from a normal position.”
At any rate, there had been a chance. Grace Spencer might have happened by. But a murderer has to take some chances, and Smith took one. With the body in the private office, Smith did three things. He took off the white coat Dr. Gordon had worn and put it on; he took Gordon’s glasses—which hadn’t been broken, fortunately for him—and put them on. Probably he had trouble seeing through them, but he wasn’t going to wear them long. And he took up the half sphere of the paper weight and pushed it against the wound he had made in Gordon’s head.
“Why?” Pam said.
“To reinforce the assumption that Gordon was killed in the office, at his desk,” Bill said. “If the question ever came up. Because, using the method he did actually use, Smith couldn’t have used the paper weight. How would he have got it?”
They thought a moment.
“All right,” Pam said. “Why not buy some glasses he could see through, instead of using Dr. Gordon’s?”
Probably, Bill said, because there seemed less risk in using the doctor’s own than in buying a pair which would have had to look like the doctor’s. Somebody might have remembered his purchase, particularly as he would have had to be particular as to style. And, although he was in the business of supplying equipment to physicians, that did not include supplying glasses, so he would have had no special ease of access to what he wanted.
“Anyway,” Bill said, “that’s apparently what he did do. Which is why we couldn’t find the glasses. He disposed of them later, of course.”
Then with everything arranged in the private office, and both doors closed, Smith—in his white coat—went on through the remaining examining rooms and pretended to examine the patients. He knew the equipment, of course; he knew how it was used. Probably he had no real trouble in convincing the four men he examined that he was a doctor, proceeding normally.
“He didn’t convince Flint,” Pam pointed out.
Bill smiled. Nobody, probably, would have convinced Flint. Flint was not open to conviction. But even Flint had merely objected that the examination was cursory; not even he had suspected that it was no examination at all.
So—Smith had finished Dr. Gordon’s chore, wearing Dr. Gordon’s white coat, Dr. Gordon’s glasses and what he was able to assume of Dr. Gordon’s manner. He had finished and, then, taken his only serious chance. He had opened the door leading from Room 6 to the backdoor corridor and, leaving the door open as a shield, stepped across the hall to the closet. For that moment, he would be in full sight of Grace Spencer, if she were at her desk. And she was. It was then, presumably, that she noticed whatever incongruity it was that had come back to plague her later—and led her to her death. But, at the moment, what Smith banked on had happened—she had seen what she was expecting to see: Dr. Gordon completing his examinations, hanging up his white coat, taking his hat, going out to lunch at a time which, later, would be easy to determine with reasonable accuracy. It had, in fact, been determined within a minute.
Outside, Smith had gone fast, to his own office. Probably, unless the indicators showed an up-elevator very near, he had gone up the fire stairs. In either case, it would have taken him two or three minutes to get from the back door to the desk in his own office. He had counted on Miss Conover to provide his alibi. She was due back at one. He knew her habits. She might be a little late, but she would, unless something very strange happened, be back by one fifteen. If she got there at one, he walked in on her—much too soon to have killed Dr. Gordon. If she came by one fifteen, she found him already at his
desk, and the alibi was as good. Even if she had come at one twenty, Smith would probably have been safe.
Pam looked uncertain. Bill nodded at her.
“Think about it,” he said. “Here is what he would have had to do: Meet Dr. Gordon somewhere—say in the corridor—after the doctor had left his office. Wait two or three minutes, engaging the doctor in conversation, until the nurse came out and got into an elevator. Then persuade the doctor to go back into his office, walk down the corridor to the private office, get the doctor seated at his desk and not only kill him but make sure he was dead. Then, after he had checked to see that he hadn’t left any evidence, after he had taken whatever precautions he could take not to be seen, Smith would have had to go out again and get back to his office. I’d hate to have to prove that, working as fast as he could, he could have done all that in a quarter of an hour. And—if Miss Conover got back even as late as one twenty, he would have had only twelve minutes at the outside. So, unless something happened to the girl during her lunch hour, he was pretty safe.”
Actually, of course, Miss Conover had got back at one thirteen and had looked at the clock and mentioned it. If she hadn’t—well, Smith could have mentioned it himself, jokingly or chidingly. Anyway, to fix it in her mind. And so he was safe, sitting in comfortable assurance, with an alibi they couldn’t break because, for the time it covered, it was true. It took the death of a tall man to trap him.
“And,” Bill said, “so far as I know—so far as, I imagine, we’ll ever know—that death was fortuitous. It was, as far as timing went, mere chance. Because there is every reason to think that Oakes killed himself solely because he was incurably ill. He planned it. But as far as Smith was concerned, it was pure accident.”
They sat silent for a long minute, warm by the fire.
“Killing Grace Spencer was a mistake,” Pam said. “His own mistake. Wasn’t it?”
Death of a Tall Man Page 21
