Murder Comes First

by Frances

  “Barton Sandford,” the man said. “This is a hell of a thing. You wanted me?” He looked at them. “I suppose it was you?” he said. “You’re the police?”

  Weigand told him who they were.

  “A damned awful thing,” Sandford said. “The poor old girl.”

  Weigand and Thompkins paid this obvious truth the tribute of a moment’s silence. Then Weigand motioned toward a chair, said that in things like this, they had to find out all they could; that, inevitably, for a beginning, they turned to relatives. Barton Sandford nodded.

  “So—” Weigand began, but Thompkins interrupted. He interrupted to say he would be getting along; he added, “Nothing’s ready for us.” Bill Weigand said, “Right,” to that and walked with Thompkins to the door and out into the hall.

  “Between us,” Thompkins said, “I’ve got a date. You know how it is. Another five minutes and they wouldn’t have caught me. Or if your inspector hadn’t been sure he had it sewed up.”

  “He’s a good cop,” Bill told the assistant district attorney. “I’ll give you he likes to get things sewed up. Who doesn’t?”

  Thompkins started down the stairs. He stopped to say that Weigand would keep an eye on the old girls. “The Misses Whitsett,” he amplified. Again, Bill Weigand said, “Right.” He said, “Leave it to us, Tommy. Don’t you always?” Thompkins only waved, and went. Bill Weigand returned to Barton Sandford, who had risen, had walked to the windows at the end of the living room and was looking down at the street. He turned as Weigand came in. He said it was hard to believe. “This room without Grace,” he amplified.

  “I know,” Bill said. He paused a moment. “Tell me what you can about your aunt, Mr. Sandford,” he said. “That is, your wife’s aunt. That was it, wasn’t it?”

  It was, Sandford said. He said he was sorry Sally wasn’t in town; he said he was trying to reach her.

  “My wife loved Grace,” he said. “They were almost like mother and daughter, in some ways. She used to live here, you know, before we were married.”

  “Trying to reach her?” Bill said.

  “She’s—she’s on a trip,” Sandford said. He spoke slowly. “A—a kind of vacation, I guess you’d call it.” Then he reddened a little. “I guess that’s what you’d call it,” he repeated. “But I’ll get hold of her.”

  He was, evidently, embarrassed; he was, Bill thought, speaking in euphemisms. The chances were that “vacation” meant departure, more or less permanent; that Sandford didn’t want to admit it, perhaps even to himself. Well, Bill thought, I’m no marriage counselor.

  “We’ll want to talk to her when you do,” Bill said. “Unless, of course, we’ve got what we need before then. Meanwhile—”

  Meanwhile, Barton Sandford told what he knew about Grace Logan. It was considerable. He had been “damned fond of Grace” and had seen more of her than one usually sees of an aunt by marriage. He had been at her house often, even since Sally left. She had now and then visited his apartment and they had talked about Sally’s disappearance. “Particularly—” he said, and then decided not to finish that. Bill waited, then led.

  Mrs. Logan had been, for five years, the widow of Paul Logan. They had one son, Paul, Jr., who now was about twenty-three or twenty-four.

  “Grace was almost forty when they were married,” Sandford said. “Thirty-nine, maybe. She’d been married before and her first husband died. Logan was—oh, maybe ten years older. All the same, they had Paul. She hadn’t had any children before and, so far as I know, he hadn’t either.”

  Sally was the daughter of Grace Logan’s only brother; both he and Sally’s mother had died when Sally was about ten. Grace Logan had raised her.

  “I don’t know if this is what you want?” Barton Sandford said, interrupting himself.

  “Neither do I,” Bill told him, and offered a cigarette. “It would be simple if I knew what I wanted, of course. Meanwhile I want everything.” He lighted his own cigarette. “Most of it won’t matter,” he added.

  “By the way,” he said then, “wasn’t Logan about to marry somebody else? A Miss Whitsett? Change his mind suddenly when he met your wife’s aunt? Very suddenly?”

  “I don’t know,” Sandford said. “I remember vaguely there was something like that. Of course, I didn’t know any of them until I met Sally.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Go ahead.”

  “Logan had quite a lot of money,” Barton Sandford said. “Left it to his wife, of course. I suppose you want that?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Go ahead.”

  “Who gets the money?” Sandford said. “I don’t know, precisely. I imagine young Paul gets most of it. Maybe Sally gets some. Sally wouldn’t kill her for it; I don’t think Paul would.” He looked earnestly at Weigand. “I can’t think of a single damn reason anybody would kill Grace,” he said. “Not a single damned one.”

  Nobody ever could, Bill thought. The victim never had any enemies; nobody would kill for money; it was always the same. And there was always somebody dead, for all that.

  “Mrs. Logan had a companion,” Bill said. “A Mrs. Hickey?”

  “Rose Hickey,” Sandford told him. “Where is she, by the way? It’ll be tough on her.”

  She was dependent on Mrs. Logan? Pretty much so, Sandford thought. She was some years younger than Grace Logan; perhaps as many as ten. She was a widow, with one daughter, Lynn Hickey. “Who works in a store or something,” Sandford said. “Fourth assistant buyer. Something like that.”

  So far as Sandford knew, Mrs. Hickey had no resources of her own. She and Grace Logan had been friends for many years; after Paul Logan died, Grace had invited her friend to live with her. Lynn was at school, then; apparently there had been enough money for that. When she finished school, she had lived with her mother and Mrs. Logan for a few months; then got an apartment of her own. Sandford didn’t know where. He didn’t, he pointed out, know most of this directly. It was hearsay through his wife. He had known Mrs. Hickey only moderately, from visiting Grace Logan; Lynn he had met once or twice.

  “Then you wouldn’t know anything about a quarrel—maybe merely a disagreement—between your aunt and Mrs. Hickey?” Weigand asked.

  Sandford looked astonished.

  “My God,” he said, “you don’t mean—”

  He didn’t mean anything, yet, Bill told him. They hadn’t seen Mrs. Hickey. They would.

  “I don’t believe it,” Sandford said. “Not from what I saw of her. She’d be the last person.” But then he paused. “Of course,” he said, “I didn’t know her well. And I don’t know about things like this.” He paused again, smiled faintly. “Perhaps I know more about cells than about people. I’m a laboratory man, you know. Biochemist.”

  Weigand said it was difficult enough for anyone to know who was the last person for murder, or who the first. Nobody really knew about “things like this.” Any opinion might be useful.

  “She seemed gentle, the little I saw of her,” Barton Sandford said. “I don’t mean weak. Probably she had a mind of her own; she’d have needed it to live with Grace. I’d have thought she’d be a hard person to quarrel with.”

  “And Mrs. Logan?”

  Sandford hesitated. Then he spoke slowly. He said that Grace had been charming, delightful, willing to do anything for anybody. And yet—

  “And yet,” he said, “in a way she may have been selfish, without knowing it. I mean—sometimes the things she wanted to do for people were the things she wanted more than the things they did. You see what I mean?”

  Bill did. He nodded.

  “Take Paul,” Sandford said, leaning a little forward in his chair, speaking carefully. “She’d do anything for the kid. Except turn him loose—let him go his own way, make his own mistakes.” He paused. “Except let him grow up,” he said. Then, again, he pointed out that he was only guessing; made again the qualification that he knew more of biological processes in laboratories than of mental processes outside them.

  Bill Weigand told
him he was doing fine.

  “Don’t get the idea I think she was domineering,” Sandford said, still earnest, his wide-spaced eyes intently on Weigand’s face. “Nothing like that. She was a fine person. She just might—” He stopped.

  “Have rubbed someone the wrong way?” Bill suggested, when Sandford did not continue.

  “Not that much,” Sandford said.

  Bill didn’t answer that. Somehow, it was evident, Grace Logan had rubbed someone the wrong way—possibly, of course, merely by continuing to be alive.

  “Do you,” he asked, “know whether Mrs. Logan had been in touch with your wife? Since your wife’s been on vacation, I mean?”

  “Sally’s written her,” Sandford said. “Grace showed me the letters. But just ‘I’m here for a few days, everything’s fine.’ That sort of thing.” He paused again. “Wrote her oftener than she did me,” he added, with a note in his voice half rueful, half bitter. “But that’s nothing to do with this.”

  “Mrs. Logan wrote your wife?” Bill asked. “The point is, if they were close, as you say, if there was something troubling Mrs. Logan, or frightening her, she might have confided in Mrs. Sandford.”

  Sandford shrugged and spread his hands. He said he supposed Grace had written his wife. He supposed she might have confided, if she had had something to confide.

  “The fact is, I don’t know,” he said. “At the moment it’s all—all a little beyond me.”

  “You know where your wife is?”

  Sandford flushed then. He shook his head slowly.

  “Not precisely,” he said. “In the middle west, somewhere. St. Louis. Kansas City. One of those places. She’s driving.’”

  She was, Weigand thought, apparently driving away from Sandford. But that should have, as Sandford said, nothing to do with this.

  “By the way,” he said, “do you happen to know where we can reach Mrs. Logan’s son? There seems to have been some mix-up about his plans. He’s not—”

  “Lieutenant,” Mullins said from the doorway. “Mr. Logan just showed up. He—you’d better talk to him, Loot.”

  Mullins stepped aside and let Paul Logan pass him into the room.

  Mrs. Logan’s son was slight, at first glance—and perhaps now particularly—he seemed almost frail. Probably, Bill thought, taking a second glance, the appearance of fragility was deceptive, was heightened by the delicate modeling of his face. When he was even younger, Bill thought, they must have called him “pretty boy,” and he must have hated it. Now, still appearing very young—younger than he could be if Sandford’s chronology was right—he was rather extraordinarily handsome. Now he was very pale, his face contorted.

  “They say,” he said to Weigand, his voice uncertain. “They say—mother—”

  “I’m afraid so,” Bill said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s—it’s hard to believe,” Paul Logan said. He put a hand up to his forehead, rubbed with slim fingers between his brows. (Lynn Hickey could have told Weigand that, unconsciously, Paul had copied this gesture; could have called it symbolic.) “She was—” He broke off. “Why wasn’t I here?” he said. “Why?”

  “She died very quickly,” Bill said. “Nobody could have done anything. There wasn’t time.”

  “She was always so well,” Paul said, as if he were groping in his mind. “She—you’re here because she was killed?”

  “Yes,” Bill Weigand said.

  “How?”

  Bill told him. He said it was very quick.

  “It must have been—agony,” the boy said.

  “It was very quick,” Bill told him. “Only seconds. Nobody could have done anything.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Paul Logan said. “Everybody loved mother. It must have been—it couldn’t have been planned.” Then he seemed to see Barton Sandford for the first time. He said, “Everybody loved her, Bart.”

  “That’s right,” Barton Sandford said, his voice gentle. “That’s right, Paul.”

  Grace Logan’s son was, Bill thought, in no condition to be questioned. They would have to wait until—

  “I didn’t find her, Bart,” Paul said. “It was the last thing mother asked me to do, and I was no good at it. No damned good.” His voice was bitter.

  “Find her?” Sandford said. “Find who, Paul?”

  “Who?” Logan repeated. “Why, Sally. Didn’t you know?”

  “Not me,” Sandford said. He added that he didn’t get it. He looked at Weigand and his eyebrows went up and he shook his head slightly.

  “We’ve been trying to find you,” Bill told Paul Logan. “You were somewhere looking for Mrs. Sandford? Why?”

  “Mother’s—mother was worried about her,” Paul Logan said, and his face contorted again, briefly, as he made the change in tense.

  The younger man turned to Barton Sandford.

  “She thought you were—well, too casual about it, Bart,” he said. “That Sally must be in some kind of trouble.”

  “For God’s sake,” Sandford said. He reddened slightly. “Sally’s my wife. Couldn’t Grace ever—” He stopped abruptly. He said, “Sorry, Paul.” He hesitated a moment, and said, “Your mother was hearing from Sally every couple of weeks. Sally was all right.” He turned to Weigand, and said he supposed it was obvious enough.

  “Sally’s left me,” he said. “Not permanently, I think—I hope. She said something about things not working out right, that she had to get away for a while and think about things. I tried to talk her out of it, and couldn’t. She took her car and promised to write and—and said she hoped she’d come back. It’s nothing to do with this. I’ve told people she’s on a trip, which God knows is true enough. She can take care of herself.” He turned back to Paul. He said Grace should have known that. Again he said he didn’t get it.

  All Paul Logan knew, he said, was that his mother had become worried. Perhaps it was something in one of the letters. He didn’t know.

  “She knew how you felt,” Paul told Sandford. “She said, ‘Maybe I’m a foolish old woman’ but—but she wasn’t old. Not really. She—” He seemed about to lose control, then to regain it. “She asked me to go to St. Louis, where Sally’s last letter came from—to find Sally and talk to her, and see—well, just see if she was all right.”

  “She’s all right,” Sandford said, and now his voice was a little harsh. “She wants to be left alone.” He looked down at Paul. “Look,” he said. “People grow up. Some people.”

  It was getting a long way from Grace Logan’s murder, Bill Weigand thought. But he let it go; perhaps it was merely going the long way round, in some fashion not now clear. More probably, it was merely one of those things about people that come out when lives are slashed by murder; one of those things with no value, no application, of no use to him as a policeman. But he let it go. He listened.

  Logan had flown out to St. Louis and been unable to find Sally Sandford there. She had written on the stationery of a hotel, but she wasn’t at the hotel.

  “And,” Logan said, “she hadn’t been. That’s what they told me, anyway. No record of a Mrs. Sandford.”

  It had been, apparently, like stepping up for a step that wasn’t there, coming jarringly, flat-footed, on an unexpected level. The boy—one kept thinking of him as a boy—must, Bill Weigand thought, have had words ready to say to Sally Sandford; have had a smile ready and a handshake ready. But there was nobody to receive words or smile or pressure of hand.

  He had, Paul Logan said, tried one or two other hotels, without result. He had felt that, in some fashion, he was failing to perform a very simple task, and had decided it was his inadequacy, and inexperience, which were to blame. So he had hired a private detective to help. The detective, beyond more or less establishing that Sally, at least under her own name, was not at any likely hotel in the city, had not helped.

  “Not likely to,” Bill told him. “Even if he was interested in more than his fee. It’s a big town. All he could do was ask around. The police—”

  Pau
l Logan shook his head. His mother wouldn’t have wanted that.

  “Nor I, for God’s sake!” Barton Sandford said, somewhat explosively. “Didn’t it ever occur to you two that Sally’s my—” He stopped again, reddening.

  “In any event,” Bill Weigand pointed out, “the fact you couldn’t find her proves nothing, Mr. Logan. She may never have planned to stay in St. Louis, may merely have used the hotel writing room. It’s common enough.”

  It was time, Bill decided, to end this journey down a side path. He got back to it.

  Paul Logan was sure, to the point of vehemence, that his mother had had no enemies; was unable to suggest anyone who would want her death, or gain by it. Most of her money came to him, he thought; some went to Sally. (That either of them might be suspected did not appear to occur to the slight, handsome youth. Which could be naïve innocence but did not have to be.) Probably some sort of provision had been made for Rose Hickey.

  “Then, as he mentioned Mrs. Hickey’s name, Paul hesitated and looked puzzled.

  “Isn’t she around?” he asked.

  Bill told him she wasn’t, told him what appeared to be the reason she wasn’t.

  “Quarreled?” Paul said. “Mother and Mrs.—” But then he stopped. It was, Bill Weigand thought, as if he had been incredulous and then had remembered something, or thought of something, which sharply abated incredulity.

  “You know what about?” Weigand asked. “Or can guess?”

  “How could I?” Paul Logan asked. He pointed out he had been away for four—no, five—days.

  Whatever disagreement the two had might have started at any time, Weigand told him. During the past five days, to be sure; as easily, a month ago.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Logan said. “You’ll have to ask Mrs. Hickey.”

  “Right,” Bill said. He added they were going to, that they had sent for Mrs. Hickey.