Murder Comes First

by Frances

  “They’re coming here?” Paul asked, quickly.

  “They?” Bill repeated.

  Paul Logan looked as if he had said more than he had planned.

  “I suppose I was thinking of her daughter,” he said, after a moment. “Lynn. She’d naturally come with her mother, I’d think.” He looked at Bill Weigand intently. “You’ll be wasting your time with Mrs. Hickey,” he said. “She wouldn’t have anything to do with—with anything like this.” He paused. “It must have been an accident,” he said.

  “Can you,” Bill asked him, “suggest any way a capsule full of potassium cyanide could get mixed with your mother’s vitamin capsules? Or, for that matter, any innocent reason for filling a capsule with potassium cyanide?”

  Logan slowly shook his head.

  “Right,” Bill said. “Neither can I.”

  “Unless—” Barton Sandford said, and Bill turned to him.

  “Unless someone planned to kill an animal of some sort,” he said. “A pet dog, for example. I mean, that might account for the loading of the capsule. Theoretically.”

  “Very,” Weigand told him. “Did your mother have a dog, Mr. Logan? Any kind of an animal she might want to dispose of?”

  Paul Logan shook his head.

  “What happened,” Bill told both of them, “is that someone with access to Mrs. Logan’s medicine cabinet put into the bottle of vitamin capsules a capsule filled with a lethal dose of cyanide. The purpose was to kill her. The poison capsule could have been put in yesterday; it could have been put in a week ago—two weeks ago, for that matter. The bottle was two-thirds empty. Originally, it contained fifty capsules. Say she’d take, at the prescribed rate of two a day, oh—thirty, thirty-five. There’s your two weeks, since the capsule could be placed anywhere the murderer chose in the bottle.”

  He looked at the other two men.

  “Which is the reason,” he pointed out, “that there’s no point in asking either of you, or anyone else, for that matter, where he was when Mrs. Logan died—or where he was yesterday, or the day before.”

  That was the trouble with poison, Bill thought. He mentally damned poisoners. They were, when they used something like cyanide, more merciful than most who killed. But they were also much harder to catch.

  “Whoever killed your mother, Mr. Logan,” he said, “had to have two things—access to the medicine cabinet; motive for murder. Access for a minute would be enough—we may find that a hundred people had it. You obviously did, Mr. Logan. You, Mr. Sandford?”

  “Sure,” Sandford said. “And the servants, Mrs. Hickey, her daughter. Any guest Grace may have had in the past two weeks who wanted to wash his hands, or her hands. There’s a bath downstairs, two—I think it is—on the floor above. Grace usually suggested anyone use hers. It’s more convenient.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “So—”

  “Come to think of it,” Sandford added, “my wife’s one of the few people I can think of who couldn’t have planted the stuff. Not within the past two weeks. She’s been away a month—month and a half.”

  “However,” Bill Weigand told him, “you don’t know where. So—you don’t know she couldn’t have been in, say, St. Louis, flown back here for a day, flown back there, continued her trip.”

  “Look—” Sandford began, standing up, very tall, flushed.

  “You brought it up,” Bill told him. “I’m merely suggesting the problems, not that your wife was here, Mr. Sandford. I’m merely stressing that, in cases like this, we fall back on motive.”

  And do we fall, Bill thought. And does a jury want more!

  “We—” Bill started again, and this time Mullins interrupted him from the door.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “Mr. and Mrs. North are here.” He paused. “They’ve come back,” he said.

  Pam North was at the door behind Mullins and Jerry was behind her.

  “Oh Bill,” Pam said, “something—oh.”

  Bill said “Hello Pam,” and waited.

  “We called Dorian,” Pam North said. “Right after we dropped the aunts at the Welby. She’s all right, Bill.”

  “Dorian?” Bill repeated. “Was there supposed to be—?”

  “We thought you’d want to know,” Pam said. “We were going to call, but if there’s one here it isn’t listed. But the Plaza’s just around the corner, anyway.”

  Slowly, Bill Weigand ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair.

  “But you’re busy with Mr. Sandford and—” Pam said, and stopped and looked at Paul Logan.

  “Mrs. Logan’s son,” Bill told her. “And her nephew. Barton—” But then he paused in turn. In some fashion, Pamela North appeared already to know Barton Sandford. He looked at Sandford, whose face was interested but puzzled. It did not appear that he knew Pamela North. “Mr. and Mrs. North,” Bill said. He did not try to explain them further.

  Paul Logan sat down suddenly and covered his face with his hands.

  “We’re both so sorry,” Pam said. “Such a dreadful thing.”

  She looked at Bill Weigand, and moved her eyes slightly, conveying something. It was not clear what; it was clear only that there was, as she said from the doorway, “something.” Something not about Dorian, therefore about Mrs. Logan’s taking off; something—of course. Something which concerned either Sandford or young Paul Logan. Bill was rather pleased with himself.

  He motioned the Norths out into the hallway and up the stairs to the floor above. On the landing there, there was a telephone on a table.

  “I told you there would be,” Pam said to Jerry. “I think it ought to be a rule that everybody is. Democracy.”

  “Listed in the directory,” Jerry told Bill Weigand. “As it happens, we aren’t ourselves,” he told his wife.

  “Only because of the butler,” Pam said. “And all those other people. The one with a dog to be boarded.” She amplified. “Somebody put want-ads in, with our telephone number,” Pam told Bill. “An awful joke, or something. So we came unlisted. Bill, you weren’t having him followed, were you? Because he was coming here anyway.”

  “Who?” Bill asked.

  Pam told him.

  “At first,” she said, “we merely assumed it was one of yours. But after we dropped the aunts, we wondered. Aunt Lucy thinks you’re wonderful, Bill, incidentally. Thelma doesn’t.”

  “After you dropped the aunts,” Bill said.

  “If it wasn’t the police, who was it?” Pam said. “Someone you ought to know about, anyway. So we telephoned you. I mean, we couldn’t, so we came.”

  The police had not been following Barton Sandford. Bill hesitated, used the telephone briefly. The district attorney’s people were not following Sandford.

  “A shamus,” Pam said. Then she looked puzzled. “Only he looked sober enough,” she added. “And not bruised. Of course, we didn’t see him very clearly.”

  Bill Weigand got the details. Not for the first time, as Pam gave them, Bill noticed how clear she could be when dealing with the objective, how sharply see and remember.

  “I’m sure he had been following Mr. Sandford,” Pam said, as she finished.

  “Right,” Bill said. He was sure too. He was sure, also, that the follower had known his business. If he knew his business, he probably would be waiting across the street for Sandford to reappear.

  “Oh, Mullins,” Bill Weigand called down the stairs. Mullins came, was instructed, went down the stairs, unhurrying; went out, unhurrying, onto the sidewalk in front. After standing there a moment, he crossed the street. Disarmingly casual, he looked into the shadows. After a little he recrossed the street, went up the stairs to the third floor landing, said, “No soap, Loot. He’s gone.”

  “He was there?” Bill asked.

  “Somebody,” Mullins said. “Long enough to smoke a couple of cigarettes. Camels. Looks as if he took his time.” He looked at Pam and Jerry North. “Of course,” he said, “we couldn’t prove it. It’s screwy.” He paused. “Like always,” he added.
r />   “Sergeant,” Pam said, “how can we help it? We just saw it.”

  “O.K., Mrs. North,” Mullins said. Inadvertently, he beamed at her. He slowly erased the beam. “All the same,” he said, and looked at Weigand.

  It didn’t fit, Bill thought. Or, did it? Perhaps Sally Sandford had done more than leave for a trip. Perhaps she had left watchers behind. It would be doing it the hard way, with Reno the easy one. He asked the Norths to tell again about the follower.

  The light had been from street lamps, leaving shadows. He had appeared and disappeared. A man of no characteristics outstanding in such light. About medium height; of medium weight; a soft hat worn to dip over the forehead.

  “I had an impression he was well dressed,” Jerry said. “I don’t know why.”

  The man had, Bill thought, been adept at his trade, or lucky at it. He had waited for a time, then gone. If he were trying to find Barton Sandford in what might, sometime, be termed a compromising situation, he had known the Logan house was not the place for it, since otherwise he would have remained. The presence of the police car, which any private operative would have recognized, had not immediately thrown him off.

  “The murderer?” Pam North said. “But what would be the point?”

  Bill didn’t know. He said so. Then he made up his mind and took the Norths back down to the living room below.

  “Mr. Sandford,” he said, “Mr. and Mrs. North passed you as you were coming here. They think you were being followed.”

  Barton Sandford looked at them blankly.

  “Followed?” he repeated. “What the hell for?” He shook his head. “No reason to follow me,” he told them.

  “Your wife,” Bill said, “might conceivably have hired private detectives. For obvious reasons.”

  “That’s impossible,” Sandford said, flatly. “Sally couldn’t—do anything like that. I told you, it hadn’t come to that, anyway. Not by miles.”

  Bill asked him if he had anything else to suggest.

  “Sure,” Sandford said. “Your friends here dreamed it. Somebody happened along after me, maybe. There are a lot of people in New York. Who’d follow me? What would be the point?”

  “You can’t think of any?”

  “Look,” Sandford said. “I’m a biochemist. Nobody important. Sure, my wife’s aunt has been murdered. And my wife’s off somewhere making up her mind about something. What’s in any of that to make some guy follow me?” He looked again at the Norths. “They dreamed it up,” he said.

  “Right,” Bill said. “They dreamed it up. But, I never knew them to before.”

  “We—” Pam began, with some firmness, but Bill moved fingers at her and she stopped.

  “All right, Mr. Sandford,” Bill said. “That’s all for now. You’re going back to your place?”

  He was going to eat, Sandford said. Then, probably, he would go back to his apartment.

  “Damn it,” he said, “I’d like to help on this.”

  He hesitated, uncertainly, as if half expecting to be asked to stay and help. But he was told only that, when there was a way he could help, he would be asked to. He left, then. A detective from the precinct, briefed by Mullins, drifted after him, keeping an eye out for any other drifter.

  It was, Bill Weigand said, as good a time as any to get something to eat. When Mrs. Hickey showed up, she was to be asked to wait. With the Norths, Bill Weigand went to a restaurant they had recently discovered on Central Park South, where martinis were crisply cold and filet mignon was thinly sliced and tender beyond anything which seemed likely; where service was rapid, if you wanted it so.

  When they had finished, stood outside in the dim, warm night, Bill hesitated, and the Norths waited.

  “You may as well come back with me,” Bill said, then. “After all, Pam’s aunt—”

  It was as good a reason as came to mind, since policemen do not overtly solicit the aid of observant amateur eyes.

  “And,” Bill said, “the inspector won’t be there.”

  “That’s something,” Jerry said, and the three went back.

  4

  Monday, 12:05 P.M. to 3:15 P.M.

  Monday was warm again, and bright, but at a few minutes after noon Pamela North had thought of nothing to do about it. Mondays were unimportant days, and might as well be rainy. Jerry was always early at his office on Mondays, starting a new week with a new rush and a brisker than normal determination. It always interested Pam North to notice that by Fridays, and sometimes even by Thursdays, the need for prompt arrival, for going at things with a will, apparently had lessened. Possibly, she sometimes thought, authors boiled up on Mondays; just as possibly, only publishers did—or perhaps only Gerald North, who on Mondays was almost entirely North Books, Inc.

  Pam sat in her living room, listening to the faint sound of Martha’s progression through the rest of the apartment, and tried to read the Herald Tribune. She had read first the account of the murder of Mrs. Grace Logan, which seemed accurate except that the name Whitsett was spelled with two “t’s” in the second paragraph and, compensatorily, with four “t’s” in the fifth. From this, Pam had gone on to what seemed like the murder of the world and then, in the hope of consolation, to Walter Lippmann. This was one of the days, she noticed, on which he wrote as if he ought to be President. (He had his vice-presidential days and even, sometimes, his merely senatorial ones.)

  “He ought to be President,” Pam told Martini, who was stretched up Pamela, a furry paw soft against Pamela’s neck. “Either he or, come down to it, Jerry. Would you like to be a presidential cat? Live in the White House?”

  Martini shook the end of her dark brown tail from side to side, and Pam said she probably was right. “Of course,” she added, “before they fixed it up, it ought to have been a good place for mice.” To this, Martini made no comment, beyond faintly purring. She was an introverted purrer, merely vibrating within. Gin purred for the world to hear. Pam, with the arm allowed her by the one they called Cat Major, tried to turn the Herald Tribune inside out to reach the editorial page, upon which she often read the letters to the editor, although rarely the editorial articles. But this caused Martini to move uneasily, and to quit purring and to open reproachful blue eyes, so Pam abandoned it. One should, Pam felt, try to preserve a sense of proportion. She managed, without moving too much, to reach a cigarette and get it lighted. She blew the smoke carefully over the top of Martini’s head. She thought of murder.

  There seemed, in connection with this one, either too little to go on or too much. A missing niece, who probably had nothing to do with it; a grief-stricken young man loosed tragically, almost surgically, from a safe dependence; a biochemist with wide-spaced eyes and open face and a tendency to flush readily; a man who was, for reasons not apparent, following the biochemist from place to place; a slim, decisive, pretty girl named Lynn and her mother, no longer slim and perhaps never decisive, yet in appearance oddly like her daughter. And, of course, Pamela’s three aunts.

  She wondered briefly whether to try to reach the aunts on the telephone, and decided not yet to disturb Martini.

  “After all,” she told the cat, who now was asleep again, “after all, they’ve gone to Wanamaker’s. It always takes ages.”

  Then she smiled, remembering Aunt Thelma’s remark when, at a few minutes after nine, just after Jerry’s resolute departure, they had talked together on the telephone. Pam had suggested lunch.

  “We’re going to Wanamaker’s,” Aunt Thelma had told her, firmly. “If we can’t go to Florida until tomorrow, we can at least go to Wanamaker’s.” She had then suggested that Pam might like to go along.

  Pam had felt duty closing in a little inexorably, and wriggled free.

  “It’s because it’s twins, I guess,” Pam said. “But I always get lost and never find anything.”

  To this Aunt Thelma had said merely “Oh?” at first and then, in a puzzled tone, “I’m sorry, Pamela. The connection—”

  “Twin buildings,” Pam said. “Sia
mese, really, because of the bridge. Anyway, I have to wait for the maid.”

  Pam then suggested dinner and duty, having got her unexpectedly by the throat, chuckled evilly. Aunt Thelma had said that that would be nice, unless they were too tired. She had asked Pam to call later. Now, Pam decided, was not enough later.

  She wondered what Bill was doing, and what he had made of Lynn Hickey and her mother, except for the obvious—that Lynn and Paul Logan were in love, the girl, under the strain of what had happened, rather irritable in her love. Probably, Pam thought, Lynn was often irritated with the boy—with his gentleness, with what was perhaps uncertainty and perhaps an inner lack of decision, with what clearly was, at least in obvious matters, a lack of self-confidence. Well, Pam thought, the girl is young; she’ll have to learn about men, if she’s going to marry one of them.

  “Dear Jerry,” Pam said aloud to Martini. “All the same, I’m glad he’s not, or not very, anyway. No more than the right amount.”

  Martini, as far as Pam could determine, understood this aside perfectly. At least, she flicked the end of her tail in sleepy comradeship.

  You had only to see Lynn and Paul Logan together to know how it was with them, Pam thought. They had been together in the room when Bill and the Norths returned and so conscious of each other that the most casual enterer of the room became conscious of their consciousness. But they had been apart, apparently because Mrs. Hickey was there—a plump woman, no taller than her five-foot daughter, gray-haired, obviously worried. And, in the end, adamant.

  It was true, she had admitted, that she and Grace Logan had had a disagreement, as a result of which she had decided to leave the Logan house and move in with her daughter. But the disagreement had been, for all that, a trivial thing.

  “It didn’t basically change the way I felt about Grace,” Rose Hickey said. “Or, I think, the way she felt about me. And it was entirely personal, Lieutenant.”

  And there she had stuck. It had had nothing to do with anything which concerned the police; nothing, remotely, to do with what had happened. Bill Weigand was patient with her; patient, afterward, with her daughter.