Murder Comes First

by Frances

  There was no answer to that but “What?” and Dorian made it.

  “Like Great Danes,” Pam said, “only it was really a police dog. They make Teeney furious and she always runs at them, only this one didn’t run. I mean, not in the right direction. She was terribly frightened but she found a tree. I feel the same way about trucks.”

  “Once there I thought we were going to need a tree,” Dorian said. “I thought you were going to settle for one of the pillars.”

  “He hadn’t any business turning out,” Pam said, turning out herself and going around, remarking, to her own steering wheel, that there ought to be a minimum just as much as a maximum. “Anyway, I had plenty of room, or almost.”

  Dorian had never seen a more alarmed face than that worn by a driver of a trailer truck who had observed, in West Street, Pamela North using what she now considered plenty of room. Of course, Dorian thought, I couldn’t see my own. She shivered slightly.

  “Whatever Jerry says,” Pam North said, speeding up, “it’s been fifteen thousand miles, anyway, since anything happened. And then he tried to pass on the right. So sixty or so more shouldn’t be hard.”

  The last was clear enough. They were an estimated sixty miles from the place they guessed the Patterson cottages to be. At the moment, Pam seemed determined, if not destined, to make the distance in an hour.

  “Who,” Pam asked, honking angrily at a man she considered about to get in her way, “would have expected it of Aunt Lucinda? The reading one? And—how did she get onto it? It must have something to do with Cripland not Gribland. But I can’t think what.”

  Neither could Dorian Weigand, holding onto the door handle, enjoying herself all the same. She hadn’t, she thought, been this far into one of them since—oh yes, since she rode into New Jersey in the trunk of an elderly car, not by choice.* At least, this time, she was riding sitting up. She wished she had had time to leave a note for Bill, when she couldn’t get him on the telephone. But he and Jerry would get together. They probably would come steaming after. Dear Bill!

  “Jerry won’t get in until after five,” Pam said, as if Dorian had spoken. Trains of thought apparently had collided. Or perhaps, as Dorian had sometimes thought, Pam could jump without words. “They ought to get started by—oh, five thirty, unless Bill’s lost somewhere. They’ll have to take your car, of course.”

  They stopped at the Harlem toll bridge and paid their dime. They went on, jumping, up the Henry Hudson toward the Saw Mill.

  “It will be dark before we get there, or almost,” Pam said. “It’ll be—I hope we get there first. I can’t get over its being Aunt Lucy. It simply doesn’t go with that hat.”

  “I don’t know,” Dorian said. “Perhaps it does, you know. Perhaps both things are a kind of breaking free.”

  Pamela North, taking the inner lane at sixty-five on the Saw Mill, chancing the parkway police, said with some fervor that she wished Aunt Lucy had been content to take it out in hats.

  “After all,” she said, “that hat is something you could do only once.” She speeded up a little. “I hope this isn’t too,” she said, her voice very sober. “The poor little dear.”

  *Dorian’s experience is recounted more fully in Untidy Murder. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1947.

  9

  Tuesday, 4:20 P.M. to 6:10 P.M.

  The bedroom in which Miss Lucinda first stood, instinctively straightening her hat, brushing at the skirt of her black silk dress with small, quick hands, was not a large room, and it was sparsely furnished. A bed, a chest, a chair—a lamp on the chest and another on a small table by the bed. The table teetered as one touched it, being unsteady on its legs. There were a few books on a shelf under the window by which Miss Lucinda had entered, and at some time the window had been left open during a rain, and the books were stained. A spread was thrown over a bare mattress on the bed and it did not lie evenly; almost without knowing what she did, Miss Lucinda brushed it into smoothness.

  And the room was empty; not in it, surely, was what she expected, and feared, to find. She looked under the bed and found the floor dusty, but found nothing else. She went to the only door, opened it, and found herself in a living room unexpectedly large.

  A stone fireplace held sway, unchallenged, over the wall opposite the door by which she entered. Ashes were piled high in the fireplace, almost covering the fire dogs; there was nothing to show whether it had been used the day before, or not since weeks before. There was a small window on either side of the fireplace, and to her right—toward the front of the house, next to the locked front door, there was a somewhat larger window. But the house was not faced toward the lowering sun of mid-October, and the room was dusky, filled with shadows.

  There were many hiding places there, and this search took Miss Lucinda time. She sought at first without turning on the lights, seeking in the shadows. There were two sofas and several easy chairs, none of them new or newly covered, but all comfortable, inviting to relaxation. These things might, she thought, have been picked up second-hand some place, or moved from another house, or from a city apartment, when new furniture was bought to replace them. Under the windows on either side of the fireplace there were deep cupboards, and it was into them Miss Lucinda looked first—looked shivering a little as she opened each, relieved to find only the gear of summer life—tennis rackets, out-of-doors clothing for rainy days, a bridge table with its chairs, golf bags leaning in corners. Miss Lucinda, although in a certain way disappointed, was yet glad when she had done with the cupboards. She sought on.

  She had looked behind each of the sofas, and under each, she had even looked up the chimney and been again at once disappointed and relieved to see, unobscured, the sky above, when she finally abandoned the living room. It would have been too obvious and, of course, in other ways impractical as a hiding place of what she was unhappily sure had been hidden. She went down the room toward the rear and through a door into a kitchen which, a little unexpectedly, contained such modern equipment as an electric range and refrigerator (its doors standing open), a sink (but with a single spout; cold water only, it was evident), a large deep freezing unit, and, less modernly, open shelves now holding little except a few cans. It was quite dark in the kitchen, and Miss Lucinda turned on the lights. The light showed her nothing, and here there was no occasion for a prolonged search. The kitchen, Miss Lucinda thought, did not lend itself to the concealment of what she sought. She left it, turning off the lights.

  There were, occupying an el, two other rooms on the ground floor—a much larger, now sun-flooded, bedroom and a reasonably modern bath opening off it. The bedroom had been, Miss Lucinda decided, built onto the original house in fairly recent years; its windows were larger, its whole feeling more of present times. It held twin beds, two chests with mirrors and a dressing table with another; there were two easy chairs, and french doors opened to a terrace. Connected with the room there was what Miss Lucinda—now more hesitant than ever, but forcing herself on—found to be a rather large closet.

  The closet was filled with a woman’s clothes, and this time not only with garments for summer’s warm, lazy days. There were several dresses obviously meant for town wear; two coats in addition to a light coat for summer evenings, and several hats—the latter nondescript, Miss Lucinda thought, restraightening her own. To search thoroughly in the closet, Miss Lucinda had to move into it, among the hanging garments, parting them. They were faintly, pleasantly, fragrant.

  And, Miss Lucinda thought, coming out of the closet without having found what she sought, there was now no real doubt she was right—no doubt at all. It was as if a little light had gone out somewhere, because Miss Lucinda had hoped—had so hoped—that she would be proved wrong after all. (Of course, Miss Lucinda thought in an aside, there might be a lot of other clothes; a really large wardrobe. In which case—)

  There was, Miss Lucinda decided, no use seeking such escapes from logic. She must, as the English said—what charming books the English women wrote, to be su
re. Dear Sheila Kaye-Smith—face up to it. She must, in her small way, prove master of her soul, as Mr. Henley had so famously been. She must not, as something prompted—but not her soul, certainly—pick up the telephone there on the table between the twin beds and ask for the return of Mr. Brisco. She must not—nevertheless, it might be as well to find out whether, if she wished, she could. She picked up the telephone and listened. There was only the faintest of empty sounds. She jiggled, but there was not even a clicking in her ears. Presumably the telephone had been disconnected for the winter. Mr. Brisco had been right. She was not, it appeared, entirely the captain of her fate; the New York Telephone Company also was involved. However—

  However, Miss Lucinda told herself, sitting down in one of the chairs and smoothing black silk over her knees, first things must come first. Second might come how she got back to—to any place. The first thing was, where was it?

  Not, apparently, in the house itself and, now, Miss Lucinda realized she had been doing the easiest thing first. It would be outside somewhere, under ground—she shivered again; surely it was really getting cooler as the sun sank—or in—why, of course! In the cellar. That was the most likely place of all. The question remained, however, was there a cellar? She had not noticed any door which seemed likely to lead to one.

  She got up from the chair and noticed that the room was now by no means as sunny as it had been. It was, she thought, getting late very early. On this point, her watch confirmed her; it was now long after five. There was not much daylight left. Miss Lucinda went more briskly through the rooms, looking for a cellar. In the kitchen—she had, she realized now, dismissed the kitchen rather cavalierly on her first time round—she found an inconspicuous door and, opening it, the unquestionable smell of a cellar. Air which was almost cold, and certainly was damp, came up from it. Miss Lucinda shivered again and tightened about her the short, inadequate coat which had, early in the day, seemed only a nuisance. She peered downward into the dark. She sought, and did not find, a light switch.

  In country cottages, she decided, there must be flashlights, and the most likely place for them would be—she began pulling out the few kitchen drawers available. She found two flashlights in the second drawer, but the first of them apparently was broken. At least, when Miss Lucinda pressed the button, nothing happened. The second produced a tired, yellow radiance. She hoped it would be enough. She returned to the cellar door, opened it—it apparently closed by itself, as a result of something in its hinges—and let yellow light trickle down steep stairs. It looked to Miss Lucinda like a place for rats.

  My head is bloody but unbowed, Miss Lucinda told herself and went cautiously down the steep stairs. The door closed behind her.

  “I don’t,” Pam North said, coming to what certainly was almost a full stop at the entrance to the Hawthorne circle, “see how she got onto it. I thought all along it was the other way around, of course. And she just pulls it out—out of that pink hat.” Pam swung around the circle into the Taconic State parkway. “It’ll be dark before we get there,” she said.

  The speed limits on the Taconic State are slightly more lenient than on the Saw Mill, where only forty is allowed. On the Taconic, one may legally do forty-five. Pam, encouraged, reached toward seventy. “While it’s still light,” she said.

  “You don’t,” Dorian told Pamela, “actually know she is onto it. I mean, you don’t know she has it right. As a matter of fact, Pam, you don’t know you have either.”

  She was invited to tell any other way it could have been. She hesitated.

  “Anyway,” Pam said, “we’ll know in an hour or so, probably. If we”—she pulled around a car doing a mere sixty; she told her steering wheel that some people oughtn’t to be allowed on parkways, which were for people going somewhere—“don’t get lost,” she said. “Unless—Dor, whatever made her? The frail, sweet, little—Dor, it scares me!”

  “At the moment,” Dorian said, “we scare me too. Particularly if you’re right. I hope Bill—”

  What he had, Inspector O’Malley told Weigand, was nothing but a hunch. Suppose he was right, where was he?

  “So you’ve got a theory about this Mrs. Sandford,” he said. “You think maybe you know where she is. So—what have you got? Where does the Logan kill come in?”

  Bill could, he said, only guess. He would guess that, somehow, Mrs. Logan had found out about Mrs. Sandford and, because of that, had been fed cyanide.

  “It’s screwy,” the inspector said. He sat behind his desk, red of face. “That Thompkins,” he said. “Like you, Bill. Making it hard.” He grew redder. “And,” he said, “she’s the aunt of this Mrs. North of yours. Don’t forget that. What’ve you got to say about that?”

  Bill knew how the inspector felt. He said so.

  “You want to make captain, don’t you?” the inspector asked. “Do you or don’t you?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Sure I do.”

  “Well?” the inspector demanded.

  Conversations with Arty often got out of hand, Bill Weigand thought sadly. If the Norths were anywhere involved, and it seemed they frequently were, the inspector could no more avoid buzzing angrily, like an incensed bumblebee, around that fact than he could—Bill’s mind paused. “Jump through the moon.” The phrase came to him unsolicited, unwanted, and for a moment unrecognized. Oh—it was Pam who said that, presumably feeling that jumping through the moon was a feat even more unlikely than jumping over it.

  “Well?” Inspector O’Malley repeated.

  “Look,” Bill Weigand said. “You know as well as I do, sir—better than I do—that Thompkins can’t take it to court. Not with the fingerprint angle. Not with the reports from Cleveland. We’ll just have to give that one up.”

  The “we” was generous, Bill thought. Arty would have to give it up. And Arty would, Arty already had. Much as he might like to see any aunt of Mrs. Gerald North’s in as much hot water as was available, Inspector Artemus O’Malley was a cop, and knew the score. He could still fume about it, but he’d lost his candy.

  “You want to have another go at Sandford, then?” Inspector O’Malley said, tacitly admitting he had given up the candy. “But there’s this other angle?”

  That was the size of it, Bill said. He had as good as been warned off. But that was when he was unofficial, or as unofficial as a cop who is never off duty can well get.

  “Who do they think they are?” Inspector O’Malley asked the world. “This is our town, ain’t it?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Our town. Our murder.”

  “What you do,” O’Malley said, “is get hold of this Sandford. Make him come clean about his wife. That’s what you do. Who do those guys think they are?”

  “You’ll clear it with them if there’s a squawk?” Bill asked.

  He was damned right the inspector would. Who did they think they were?

  It was unnecessary to tell the inspector that they thought, rightly, that they were agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; that they thought they had something coming along they didn’t want tampered with; that they suspected the local police might upset their much prized apple-cart.

  “The way I look at it,” Inspector O’Malley told Lieutenant Weigand. “Murder comes first. I don’t give a damn who this Sandford is. You put it up to him.”

  Bill Weigand said, “Right.” He went.

  He went, he drove to Barton Sandford’s apartment; he did not find Barton Sandford. He drove uptown to Gimo’s Restaurant in the East Fifties. Sandford was not there. From Gimo’s, he telephoned his apartment. Nobody answered his call. It was after five, then; Dorian and Pam were having quite an afternoon for themselves. He tried the North apartment, and again got no answer. It was only then he realized how surely he had expected Dorian and Pam to be at the Norths’, their day’s work—whatever it had been—done; the time for cocktails arrived. It was only then he realized he was beginning to be worried.

  There are few greater fallacies than the belief that, bec
ause a man can write well enough to get books published, he can make a speech to several hundred women without falling flat on his face. This fact Jerry considered morosely in the club car as he sipped, also morosely, at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s version of a martini.

  “I was terrible,” the shaggy man in the next seat told Jerry North. “Don’t tell me I stank.” He drank scotch.

  “You were all right,” Jerry told Ferguson, with gloomy insincerity. “How about another drink?”

  “I might as well,” Ferguson said. “Or shoot myself. You talked me into it, remember.”

  “You were fine,” Jerry said. “As good as anybody.”

  “God!” Ferguson said, simply.

  Jerry hoped that Pam hadn’t got herself into trouble. He hoped she had stayed home, or gone to the Welby and held the hands of aunts. He hoped he never had to hear writers speak again. He hoped he never again had to scratch at a hotel’s luncheon version of broiled spring chicken. He had little confidence in the fulfillment of any of these hopes.

  “Tell you what,” Ferguson said, from the middle of his new scotch. “I write ’em, you sell ’em. How’s that?”

  “Next time,” Jerry told him. “You’ve got Boston coming up Friday, remember. Can’t get out of that now. Very fine audience at Boston.”

  “God,” Ferguson said, and finished the scotch. He looked out the window. “Newark,” he said, in the same tone. “You going along to Boston?”

  “Kennely’ll be along on that one,” Jerry told him. Which is something, he told himself.

  “God,” said Ferguson. “I should have been a painter.”

  “They have to show up at shows,” Jerry told him, and finished the martini.

  “A traveling salesman,” Ferguson said. He qualified it.

  Now, Jerry thought, we get the Hemingway routine.

  “Speaking of Hemingway,” Ferguson said, unexpectedly, “what the hell was the idea—”