Murder Comes First

by Frances

  “Now lady,” the hacker said, in a tone of weary reason, “you ought to know that. I’m just telling you, I don’t like it. You got to figure he might miss. You give a guy a revolver, or maybe an automatic, and nine times out of ten he hits the wrong guy.” He paused, went deftly around a bus, grazing it only slightly. “Like me, for instance,” he said. “Especially if it’s a big gun,” he said. “A forty-five, maybe.”

  Pam was not frightened by this; she shivered, but she was not really frightened. Only, maybe a cab was a bad idea; maybe she should have—

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Take me back.”

  “Back, lady?” the driver said.

  “Where you got me,” Pam told him. “Saks.”

  The driver said, “O.K.” and turned emphatically right in Fifty-fourth Street. He turned in front of a bus which was just starting up, and abruptly decided not to. The bus driver leaned out of his window and made remarks. He was still making them when another cab turned in front of him.

  (It was the last of many straws for Timothy O’Mahoney, who had driven Fifth Avenue buses for years and never liked any part of it. “All right,” Timothy said, “that does it.” He opened the doors of his bus, picked up his change holder, and stepped out. Then he leaned back in. “We’re not going no further,” he told a busload. “You can sit or walk.” As for Timothy himself, he walked. Timothy subsequently became something of a hero to the newspapers, if not to the Fifth Avenue Coach Company.)

  By the time of Timothy’s revolt, Pam’s taxicab was half way to Madison, stopped in traffic. Pam looked back through the rear window. Another cab was immediately behind. It appeared to have a medium man in it.

  “Here,” Pam said, thrust a dollar at her driver, and departed his cab. She went across the street between two trucks, doubled back toward Fifth. While she was crossing the street, she heard a car door slam. She looked quickly; the medium man was out, on the left. He was waiting for a truck to pass.

  Pam North, taking advantage of this momentary curtain, doubled back again, this time toward Madison. She went east at a brisk trot, which interested other pedestrians. “You’ll catch him, lady,” a truck driver advised her cordially. “Just keep tryin’.”

  This isn’t the way, Pam thought. This isn’t at all the way. This way just attracts him. She slowed abruptly from a trot to a saunter, and was bumped into from behind. She turned to face her pursuer, and faced a very short, very fat man, very red in the face.

  “Whyn’t you watch where you’re stopping?” the fat man enquired, puffily.

  Pam said she was sorry, and started up again, finding an average between her two previous gaits. The thing, she decided, was to be nonchalant. She stopped to look into a window. She gazed with rapt interest at two bolts of tweed material, neither of which—she thought under her mind—would be good on Jerry. She looked, as casually as she could, back the way she had come. The medium man would be looking in a window. He was. He was looking with intensity at a display of one, no doubt perfect, hat. Pam, who had been faintly conscious of the hat as she flitted past it, thought of suggesting they change windows. She thought also of confronting her pursuer. Then she thought of her lack of any positive knowledge that he did not, indeed, have shooting in mind. Pam went quickly toward Madison.

  She turned right there and did not look back. She walked to Fiftieth, west again, again into Saks Fifth Avenue. But this time she headed directly for the elevators as, she now realized, she should have done before. She wedged into one and, at the fifth floor—Women’s and Misses’ Dresses—wedged out again. She trotted briskly forward, then to her left, into the salon.

  “Can I help madame?” a salesgirl in black enquired. She could; she had better.

  “Something in wool, I think,” Pam said. “And—could you just put me in a dressing room and bring things in? I’m—” she paused. “Rather in a hurry,” she added.

  Into the dressing room no man, medium or otherwise—except, of course, a husband—could follow Pam. She took off her dress, lighted a cigarette, and sat down. She would show him; she had, indeed, already shown him. She sat in bra and nylon petticoat, relaxed. The salesgirl arrived with woolen dresses. Well, Pam thought, as long as I’m here. Anyway, it wouldn’t be right not to. She began to try on dresses. There was a lovely one in a kind of rust color which, it was apparent to the salesgirl, particularly did things for Pamela North. As soon as she had seen Pamela North, the salesgirl had thought instantly of the lovely one in a kind of rust color.

  It was wonderful. It was a hundred forty-five fifty. It was absurd. Pam tried on five other dresses, one of which was only eighty-nine ninety-five.

  “But it doesn’t really do anything for madame,” the salesgirl told her. “A lovely dress, of course, but for madame—” She clucked slightly.

  Pam tried on the rust-colored dress again. It really did do things for her.

  “Well,” Pam said, “I hadn’t actually planned—”

  “Madame will never regret it,” madame was assured.

  “Well,” Pam said, “all right, I guess. Charge and—” Then she paused, remembering she had forgotten why she was there. “I wonder if you’d do me a favor?” Pam said. “See if there’s a man outside?”

  “A man?” the salesgirl repeated. “Oh—your husband, miss?” The salesgirl’s voice lilted a little; it was, by and large, better to get them with husbands along. A man who could be brought along could be brought to almost anything—up to two or three hundred, often.

  “What does he look like, miss?” the salesgirl asked, and Pam hesitated.

  “Well,” she said, “youngish.”

  “Of course,” the salesgirl said.

  “Sort of—well, sort of medium,” Pam said. “Sort of not very tall, you know, but not not tall.” She paused. Thinking of it, she had never seen—or partly seen—a man less easy to describe. “He looks like almost anybody,” she told the salesgirl.

  The salesgirl said, “Well,” doubtfully, her hopes a little dashed. He didn’t, she thought, sound like the two or three hundred dollar kind of husband. Some women are certainly casual about husbands, the salesgirl thought, and went. She returned.

  “I guess he’s the one,” she said. “There are two of them, actually, but one’s about sixty and with somebody. I guess the other’s the one.”

  (Mr. Ralph Hopkins, the other one, an auditor living in Rutherford, New Jersey, sighed at this moment. He wished his wife would come out and show him another. Whatever it looked like, he’d say it was fine.)

  “I guess,” Pam North said, “I’d better look at something for afternoon.”

  5

  Monday, 5:20 P.M. to 8:35 P.M.

  Gerald North crossed the living room hurriedly when he heard Pam’s key in the lock, and they turned the knob together from opposite sides of the door. Pam came in quickly, pushing the door to behind her, and said, “Jerry! The most awful—” precisely as Jerry said, “Pam! For heaven’s sake—” Then they both stopped.

  “Shopping!” Jerry said then, looking at his wife, who was wearing a rust-colored woolen dress and a hat he had never seen before. “While—”

  “No,” Pam said. “Oh, Jerry. Not really. It was just that I had to. Jerry, I’ve been being followed! It rubbed off on me!”

  “Rubbed?” Jerry said. “Off?”

  “The medium man,” Pam said. “From Mr. Sandford. At lunch, apparently. As for shopping, what else could I do? Because he couldn’t get into a trying-on room, naturally.”

  Jerry ran his right hand through his hair. He said, “Listen Pam.”

  “That way I shook him,” Pam said. “Because, you see, he was expecting a blue dress and no hat, the way I had been, so this was really a disguise.” She looked down at the dress. “Of course,” she said, “it does do something for me, don’t you think?”

  “Listen Pam,” Jerry North said. But he looked at her.

  “It’s a swell dress,” he said. “Not that you needed anything done. Pam, is there a beginning?�
�

  There was. Pam began at it; she took it step by step.

  “Then of course,” Pam said, “when the girl found he was still outside, waiting for me to come out of the trying-on room, I couldn’t leave. So I had to look at more dresses. And then the hat department came around and I realized I didn’t have anything to go with this one”—she indicated the dress—“so I looked at hats. The afternoon dress you’ll love, Jerry. It’s the very newest old-fashioned-looking and—”

  “Listen Pam,” Jerry said. “This was all while you were hiding from the man who was following you? I mean, the dresses and hat—” He paused. “Hats?” he asked, doubtfully. Pam shook her head.

  “Only a new girdle,” Pam said. “Except for the stockings, which I already had, and your handkerchiefs, of course. Oh yes—a slip. But the stockings and the handkerchiefs haven’t anything to do with the rest of it. The disguise part.”

  “You went into the dress salon to get away from this man,” Jerry said, a little as if he were counting. “You went into a dressing room because he couldn’t follow you there. And, because you happened to be there, you bought two new dresses and a new hat and—”

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “You want me to have clothes. And for all you know wearing the wool one out saved my life!”

  “Listen, dear,” Jerry said. “I think the clothes are fine. I want you to have clothes. It’s just—” He ran his fingers through his hair again. “I guess it’s just so damned impromptu,” he said. “So—” Then he grinned at her. He told her the hat was swell too.

  “All right,” Pam said. “If you’d been me, what would you have done? Where would you have gone he couldn’t come?”

  Jerry told her.

  “You can’t stay in one of those for hours,” Pam objected. “I mean, what would you do?” Jerry continued to grin at her. “And,” Pam said, “what would I have done about a disguise?”

  There was, Jerry agreed, always that. He thought, he told her, that she had acted very wisely. It had been, he told her, quick thinking. She looked at him.

  “Really,” Jerry told her. “And when you were disguised? So—becomingly?”

  She had left the dressing room, gone down a long corridor, come out through another exit into the main salon. It had been empty by then, or empty of what mattered—the medium man. Pam had moved fast to the elevator, on the street floor fast again to the Forty-ninth Street door and a cab. So far as she knew, the medium man had not seen her or, in her new outfit, recognized her. She had come home.

  “What we’ve got to do now,” Pam said, “is get hold of Bill and—”

  But now Jerry slowly shook his head. They’d get hold of Bill Weigand; in fact, he was then on his way to the apartment. They would tell him. But—

  “You see, Pam,” Jerry said. “Something else happened, while you were being followed. The aunts—it looks like the aunts are in trouble, Pam. For all I know, they’re in jail. Aunt Thelma, anyway.”

  Pam said, “Jerry!”

  “You see, Pam,” Jerry said, “a couple of men from the D.A.’s Bureau dropped around on a hunch. Figuring they might find something. The aunts were out some place.”

  “Wanamaker’s,” Pam said. “How perfectly ridiculous. I mean, what did they think they’d find?”

  “I don’t know precisely,” Jerry told her. “But, what they did find was cyanide. In capsules, in a bottle, marked poison. And—in Aunt Thelma’s suitcase.”

  Pam’s eyes were wide in her awakened face.

  “Jerry,” Pam said, “it can’t be.”

  Apparently, Jerry told her, it was. The aunts had returned to find the district attorney’s detectives waiting. The aunts had been taken to the district attorney’s office. Possibly they were still there, being questioned. Inspector O’Malley was there. Bill was, or had been. And, it was pretty much out of Bill’s hands. For all Jerry knew, the aunts might by now be in the House of Detention for Women on Sixth Avenue. Unless by some miracle they had been able to explain—

  The doorbell rang then in a characteristic rhythm. They let Bill Weigand in. He looked tired; he also looked worried. He admitted he needed a drink, and Jerry mixed martinis.

  “He just told me,” Pam said. “I just got home. The poor old things. But they’ve explained, haven’t they?”

  “How?” Bill asked her. “They’ve said they never saw the stuff before; that somebody must have put it there. In other words, it’s a frame-up. Miss Thelma Whitsett appears to suspect the police; Miss Lucinda Whitsett is certain it was the murderer himself. Miss Pennina has no suggestions. Thompkins won’t have any part of that argument, naturally. Neither will the inspector.” He paused. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it’s not so damn good, is it?”

  “But of course that’s what happened,” Pam said.

  She was told she was loyal.

  “Why wouldn’t it be possible?” she asked

  Bill Weigand shrugged to that. Of course it was possible. Almost anything was almost always possible. Perhaps a jury would—

  “No!” Pam said. “You can’t let it go that far, Bill.”

  Bill Weigand accepted a glass; he drank.

  “My dear,” he said, “I’m a lieutenant, acting as captain. The inspector will settle for Thelma Whitsett; I imagine Thompkins will. For practical purposes, I’m out of it. Even if I believed your aunts, Pam—well, if the inspector and the D.A. decide they’ve got a case, what can I do?”

  “You do believe them,” Pam told him.

  But then he shook his head. He said that, probably, the inspector and Thompkins were right. To this, Pam shook her head firmly.

  “Right,” Bill said, and his voice was tired. “So—I’m not satisfied. Too pat in places, too obscure in others. The motive doesn’t convince me. But the situation is the same. It’s pretty much out of my hands.” He finished his drink. “You see,” he said, “O’Malley can call me off. And will.”

  “Listen,” Pam said, “let them fit this in, Bill. I was followed all afternoon, starting with having lunch with Mr. Sandford.”

  She told her story. As she told about her lovely new disguise, Bill looked quickly at Jerry and they smiled companionably.

  “Although,” Jerry said, in reply to nothing spoken, “I don’t know why I’m amused.”

  “You two!” Pam North said, and continued. “And,” she concluded, “I didn’t make it up. You know that, Bill. I don’t do things like that.”

  “Right,” Bill said. His tone was puzzled. “I suppose,” he said, “they thought you were the other woman. Wanted to identify you. As a matter of fact, probably they did.”

  “How?” Pam said.

  Bill told her. She had ordered, and charged, handkerchiefs at a counter. Without her charge-a-plate, she had given her name orally. The medium man was—how far away?

  “But after that,” Pam pointed out, “he still followed.”

  There was that, Bill admitted; there was that that didn’t fit. He was told that none of it fitted; that, further, Pam did not believe it was merely a divorce investigation.

  “All of it,” Pam said, “has got something to do with it. Even the inspector would see that. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll—”

  “I wouldn’t, Pam,” Jerry said. “You know the inspector.”

  “What needs doing,” Pam said, “is finding Mrs. Sandford. Instead of chivying poor old ladies merely because—” But there she stopped.

  “Right,” Bill said. “Because they carry cyanide around. And another poor lady died of it.”

  “All right,” Pam said. “Why carry it around? Say Aunt Thelma used it and killed Mrs. Logan. So she keeps a whole bottle of it handy—for anybody who wants to look—in her suitcase. Labeled.”

  “I know,” Bill said. “I said I wasn’t satisfied. I’ll admit I haven’t been called off—yet. Also, I’d like to talk to Mrs. Sandford. She’s in Kansas City, now. Or she was Friday.”

  Both the Norths waited.

  “A letter came this morning,” Bil
l told them. “Addressed to Mrs. Logan; signed merely with an ‘S.’ It said, ‘Dear Aunt Grace: I’m driving on West. Don’t worry about me. Tell Bart I’m all right and still thinking.’ The envelope was postmarked in Kansas City, twelve noon Friday. We’ve asked the K.C. police to see if they can find her. Of course, she may have gone on by now.”

  “Actually,” Pam said, “she may be any place by now.” Pam pointed out the existence of airplanes. “Not that I would on a bet,” she added. “They run into things. The ground, mostly.” She paused. “Speaking of airplanes,” she said, “why didn’t the letter get here Saturday?”

  That one had an easy answer. The letter had not been sent by air mail.

  “Just signed with an ‘S,’” Pam said. “But I suppose you checked the handwriting?”

  The letter, Bill told her, had been typed. Only the signing initial was handwritten. But, before Pam got ideas, they had no doubt the letter was from Sally Sandford. Grace Logan had kept her niece’s recent letters and several older ones, written before Mrs. Sandford had left her husband to think about whatever she was thinking about. The letters were all typed, and all, at the most casual glance, on the same typewriter—an old one certainly, a machine with the letter “r” canted to the right and the letter “e” perceptibly below alignment.

  “We’ve checked with Sandford this afternoon,” Bill said. “Showed him the letter. This was before we were told about the finding of the cyanide, incidentally. He identified the letter as from his wife; said the signature “S” was characteristic, and that he’d recognize the typescript anywhere. He said she always typed letters, on a portable Underwood she’d had for years.”

  “Of course,” Pam said, “anybody who had the typewriter could write the letter. And anybody could forge a single initial, I’d think.”

  “Right,” Bill agreed. “So?”

  Pam didn’t, she admitted, see where it got them. She merely said it was strange that there was a mystery about Sally Sandford, and at the same time a mystery about her aunt’s poisoning, and Sandford’s being followed.

  “And my being,” she said. “Also, about why Mrs. Logan and Mrs. Hickey quarreled. Mr. Sandford thinks he knows that, incidentally.”