A Pinch of Poison

by Frances Lockridge

  “Footprints!” the murderer thought, and stopped. “I’m leaving footprints,” the murderer thought. Then, with a puzzled sigh, the murderer remembered that that thought had come before and been allowed for. The fear which had surged up for a moment, as if something vital had been forgotten until it was too late, ebbed away. “My hand before my face,” the murderer thought. “My hand before my face.”

  The door of the house ought to be a little to the right of the window. They would be watching the house. For minutes the murderer had stood at the end of the street, in the darkness, and waited until there was dark movement near the house, just perceptible against the fading light in the sky to the west. That would be the watcher, the murderer had decided, and had moved backward cautiously in the shadow and gone down another street and then, very slowly and with a kind of desperate care, through a weed-grown lot. If they are smart, the murderer thought, they’ll find out the way I came through the weeds. The murderer giggled, thinking how little good it would do them if they did.

  It was, the murderer thought, moving with slow care toward the house, easier the other way. The white powder had looked so innocent in the little twist of paper; there was no terror in letting it slip from the paper into the glass. It was not like murder, the murderer thought—the mind would not accept a few grains of white powder in a glass as murder. You felt no particular responsibility for what happened; it was as if the white powder, in some fashion of its own, became the murderer. Between what you did, untwisting paper and letting powder spill, and the death which came afterward there was no connection that the emotions could compass. You knew you had killed, but you did not feel like a murderer. When you murdered you saw the other person’s face near your own, and saw terror in it and then—you killed. You reached out a hand and there was death in it, and you killed.

  It is real this way, the murderer thought, and there was a kind of savage eagerness in the thought. The other one who died had been an obstacle; you pressed a button and, at a great distance, the obstacle disappeared. But this one was an enemy and you would meet your enemy and see fear in the enemy’s face and then your one hand would act. The murderer looked at the weapon. A knife would have been better; there was a kind of dreadful intimacy about killing with a knife. But it was too late to think of that, now.

  Here was the door and the murderer raised a hand. It had come, now; now there was no waiting for it any longer. The murderer knocked.

  A dog began barking shrilly inside. The murderer waited and the dog’s bark died away.

  “No!” the murderer thought. “She’s got to be there!” The murderer knocked again.

  There were slow, heavy steps moving toward the door. Then they stopped and the woman inside spoke.

  “Who is it?” she said. “Go around to the front.”

  “No,” the murderer said. “You know who it is. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. “So it’s you. I wondered if you wouldn’t come sneaking around. Wait a minute. You can talk to me, all right.”

  The murderer heard the metallic clatter, subdued and small, as the chain was lifted inside. Now, the murderer thought. Now it has come. The door opened a little way and the woman stood in it.

  “Well,” she said, “so it’s you, all right, is it? I thought—”

  There was no use letting her go on. It was now—now! The gun spoke three times.

  It was not as the murderer had thought it would be. There had been no time for terror in the other face; it had merely been the old woman’s face, with a kind of satisfaction in it, and then, in the instant before she fell, there had been nothing in the face at all—not even surprise. And then the woman was no longer standing at the door.

  The murderer ran, now. Now the darkness was a friend, was safety. The wet grass and the wet bushes closed behind the murderer, like a concealing curtain; the murderer could feel the world thickening behind to protect. There was a kind of exultation in the murderer’s mind. “I’m safe,” the murderer thought. “Now I’m safe!”

  13

  WEDNESDAY

  9:20 P.M. TO 10:45 P.M.

  When the telephone bell shrilled Weigand was nearest, and he scooped it up even as Mr. North nodded at him.

  “Yes,” Weigand said. There was a pause. “Yes? Right, Sullivan.” There was another pause. Weigand’s voice when he spoke again was not raised, but there was a new timbre in it. “Who got her?” He listened again. “No,” he said. “I suppose you couldn’t. Are you sure she’s dead? Where are you?” Pause. “Well, get on to the precinct. Tell them to get some men around the block—around several blocks, if they’ve got enough. How long has it been?” He listened. “It won’t do any good, probably,” he said. “Tell the precinct it’s our case and get them on it. Get the district squad on it. I’ll be along. What?—Right!”

  He was standing as he dropped the telephone back on its cradle.

  “Mrs. Halstead has been shot,” he said. “She’s dead.” He looked at the others; at Mullins, who was on his feet, too. “God knows I don’t get it,” Weigand said. “Unless—” He stared unseeingly at Mr. North for a moment. He pulled himself out of it. “All right, Mullins,” he said. His voice was crisp and full of purpose. “We’re going along.”

  “Do you suppose it’s the same one?” Mr. North said. His voice sounded alarmed. Weigand looked at him and saw him.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “It looks like it, doesn’t it?” He was reaching for the door when he spoke again. “I guess we’ll have to wash out your kidnaping theory, Pam,” he said. He was through the door and halfway down the stairs. Mullins, however, stopped a minute with his hand on the knob.

  “Goodnight,” Mullins said. “I’m—” He clutched for the correct words. “I’m sorry we have to bust off like this, Mrs. North. We had a swell time.” Mullins took one last look at a tantalus which contained rye. “As far as it went,” Mullins said, a little wistfully. Then he called, “O.K., Loot,” in answer to a muffled sound from below, and went heavily, but rapidly, down the stairs.

  “Well,” Mrs. North said, looking after him. “That was sudden, wasn’t it?”

  “Very,” Mr. North agreed. “There’s nothing like a murder to break up a party.”

  Mrs. North said she was just thinking that.

  “You know,” she said, “do you suppose it could be something we do—something wrong, I mean?—All our dinners seem to end like this nowadays. With murders.” Mrs. North looked perplexed. “Do you suppose,” she said, “it could be something about us?”

  The side street in Riverdale, so deserted an hour earlier—so distant, in its eddy, from the city of New York—was busy enough now. Weigand wheeled the Buick diagonally to the curb, so that its headlights joined others in sweeping the rough, weed-grown yard; in glaring harshly on the old brick of the house itself. Green-and-white radio cars stood by the curb. Behind the house, visible and audible as Weigand stepped from the car, men moved with lights. Somebody said, “Here. Look at this!” and lights converged in a knot.

  A light swung into Weigand’s face as he walked up the path with the car lights behind him. “All right, buddy,” a heavily official voice started.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Weigand. Homicide.”

  “Yes, sir,” the voice said, still official, but less heavy. “They’re waiting for you inside, Lieutenant.”

  He didn’t need to be told that Mullins, moving in on the lieutenant’s heels, was another cop. Even if Mullins had been alone, not sponsored by the Lieutenant, no other cop would ever have called him “buddy,” in the tone reserved for interfering laymen. Mullins was policeman to his shoe-leather, and looked it every inch. “Hiya,” he said to the uniformed man who had checked them. “Hiya,” the patrolman responded, giving the password.

  They were already rigging floodlights in the old house, augmenting the smaller glow from forty-watt bulbs in bargain basement lamps. The cold, inquiring glare of the floods was merciless to the old house—to old rugs
on the uneven floors, to faded paper curling away from the walls of the hall, to the holes in the covers of heavy, ancient chairs.

  “Right,” Weigand said to a detective who told him, “right out there, Lieutenant.” “Right,” he said again, when another detective straightened up as he entered and said, “Weigand? Kenman. Bronx Homicide.

  “Here she is,” Lieutenant Kenman said, needlessly. “Three of them. Right through her.”

  Weigand knelt where Kenman had been kneeling. She had been a big, heavy woman, had Mrs. Halstead; a woman with an unrelenting face. The face had relented, now, but even in death it was formidable. She lay huddled, as if she had been half supported by something when she was shot, and had crumpled to the floor. Weigand swung a torch around, examining the old boards of the kitchen floor. Blood was dull on the boards. The beam of the torch swept under an old icebox, from which brown paint was flaking, and picked up two small, answering beams.

  “What the hell?” said Weigand. He moved the light a little and, behind the tiny lights was a cowering cat. “Poor little devil,” Weigand thought. “There ought to be a dog. Anybody seen it?”

  “We’ve got it in another room,” Kenman said. “It was a nuisance out there. It—it had been around after she was shot. Blood all over it.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “The M.E. been along?”

  He hadn’t, Kenman said. He had a ways to come. There wasn’t, anyway, much they needed the M.E. to tell them.

  “Somebody stood outside,” Kenman said. “There are some marks out there—thin, dried mud. She opened the door. Somebody plugged her three times with a .38.”

  “So,” Weigand said. “You got a bullet?”

  They had found a bullet only partly embedded in the wall behind Mrs. Halstead. It had gone through her, missing bone. It came from a .38 and was in good enough shape for comparative analysis when they had a gun to check. Weigand nodded.

  “That’ll help, when we get the gun,” he said. “Make your D.A. happy. Although I don’t suppose he’ll ever come in on it—New York County’s got first crack, I should think. Right?”

  It was, Kenman said, no skin off him. The district attorneys could fight it out.

  “So you figure,” he said, “that this hooks up with the Winston kill?”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “it wouldn’t just happen that way, would it? I mean, it doesn’t figure to. The people were hooked up, certainly. So one murderer probably does for both.”

  Kenman nodded. He’d figured it that way, of course.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “And where do we stand now? What’s the precinct doing?”

  The precinct had all the men it could spare on the job; so did the detective division which included the precinct. “They’re cleaning up out back as well as they can in the dark,” Kenman said. “They’ve found where the killer went through, going away. He wasn’t waiting for anything. They’ve found where he stood on the porch—apparently he persuaded the old girl to open the door for him. Then he plugged her, and got going. He must have gone fast, or your man would have picked him up.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Where is Sullivan?”

  “Helping around somewhere,” Kenman said. “You want him?”

  Weigand did. Sullivan was yelled for by a man whose voice barked in the night. Sullivan appeared, not looking very happy.

  “It’s a hell of a note, Lieutenant,” he said. “But what could I do? There’s no cover out front; unless I was going to go in and sit with the old dame, I had to hang out across the street. And how was I to cover the back door?”

  “All right, Sullivan,” Weigand said. “Nobody’s blaming you. What happened?”

  Sullivan had been, he said, standing across the street, where the shadow was deepest. He was standing so that he could look along the side of the house, and command a section of the back yard. There was only one light in the house—a dim one from one of the side windows, near the rear. He was keeping an eye on it, and whatever else was going, when he heard the dog bark. He wondered about that and started across the street and stopped. The dog’s barking was something to wonder about, but nothing to act on. It was about a minute—perhaps two minutes—later that he heard the sound of three shots, close together. Then he moved.

  He ran along the side of the house, but couldn’t run full out because of the roughness of the ground and an undergrowth of weeds and bushes. By the time he got around to the back door, he heard somebody running a good way off. But he looked for Mrs. Halstead, first, when he saw that the back door was partly open. He found her when he tried to open the door a little more; she was lying against it. He went around to the side and in through a window so as not to disturb the body.

  “And I didn’t know she was dead,” he said. “I didn’t want to push her around if she wasn’t. It makes a difference, lots of times.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “I don’t know what more you could have done. But by the time you found out about her, the murderer had got away. You didn’t hear any more running?”

  “That’s it,” Sullivan said. “But there’s only one of me, Lieutenant.”

  Weigand nodded, abstractedly.

  “What else do we know?” he asked Kenman. Kenman knelt again by the body. “Feel this,” he said. “It isn’t blood.”

  He directed Weigand’s hand to the hem of the long, black skirt. It was wet. Moving his hand, Weigand found it was wet all along.

  “Just water,” Kenman said. “The shoes are wet, too. She’d been out somewhere just before—during the rain or just after it.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “How about a coat—a raincoat? Or an umbrella?”

  The boys had been looking, Kenman said. He called to one of them.

  “That’s right,” the detective said. “We just found it, hanging up in the bathroom. An umbrella, that is. No coat.”

  “Wet?” Weigand asked.

  “Yeh,” the detective said. “Pretty well soaked.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. To Kenman he said, “Maybe it’ll help, eventually. Anything else?”

  “Well,” Kenman said, “she’d eaten dinner before she went out. Stacked the dishes but not washed them. Had beans, apparently.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “We’ll tell the M.E. Give him something to look for. And—”

  There wasn’t, Kenman said, much else yet. It was an odd house; about half of it apparently wasn’t in use, and hadn’t been for years. Mrs. Halstead seemed to have lived in a couple of rooms downstairs and the kitchen. There was another room upstairs which looked more habitable than the others, and more recently used. Nothing was very clean, including the clothes of Mrs. Halstead which filled a closet opening off the central hall. That was about all—

  “Here’s something, Lieutenant,” a new voice said. A small, thickset detective appeared with it.

  “You Lieutenant Weigand?” he said, addressing the Homicide Bureau man. Weigand nodded. “Then the old dame was writing you a letter,” the thickset detective said. “Stuffed down by the cushion in that old chair of hers. We just dug it out.”

  He handed Weigand a sheet of paper. It was crumpled, and Weigand straightened it out. Kenman put the beam of his flashlight on it and Weigand read:

  “Lieutenant Weigand: I have been thinking things over since your intrusion today and have also made a discovery about Michael’s father which I think will in—”

  The letter broke off.

  “So then,” Weigand said, “the murderer knocked at the door.”

  Kenman looked at him.

  “Yeh,” he said. “You make it sound like a book title, but that’s probably the way it was.”

  “‘In—’” Weigand quoted. “‘Interest you,’ probably.” He stared at the letter. “Damn!” he said. “Just when she was going to spill it. This guy annoys me, Kenman.”

  “He is sort of annoying,” Kenman admitted. “What’s the routine?”

  “Oh,” Weigand said, “turn the boys loose, of course. I don’t suppose th
e fingerprint boys will get much. Oh, by the way, they’ll probably get mine—I was here today. Have them check at Headquarters before they start baying, will you?” He looked around the room. “The pictures will be pretty, won’t they?” he said. “They ought to get the cat there, crouching by the body. The papers would love ’em.”

  “Sure,” said Kenman. “They’d be pretty.”

  “We’ll have to try to find out where she’d been,” Weigand said. “It may not mean a thing—probably she was just out after a quarter-pound of tea, or something. And it may mean the hell of a lot.”

  “Yes,” Kenman said. “I’ll get the boys on it. Anything else special, since it’s your case?”

  Weigand thought and shook his head.

  “Just the ordinary,” he said. “We’ll find out everything we can, and save the bullets and take the prints. I’d like reports downtown, of course. And if the boys in the back yard run across a murderer in the bushes they might bring him along.”

  “Yeh,” Kenman said. “I’ll remind them. You know who did it?”

  Weigand looked at him.

  “I wouldn’t say know who, by a long shot,” he said. “I’ve got a hunch, but I can’t break it. I can guess why.”

  “She knew something,” Kenman said. It was more statement than interrogation. Weigand nodded.

  “Right,” he said. “I’d say she knew something. And that she was going to spill it. And now where do you suppose Mullins is?”

  They sought Mullins and found him in the back yard, looking gloomily at some footprints etched smudgily on a small expanse of weedless earth.

  “Tennis shoes,” Mullins said darkly, when they found him. “Old tennis shoes. No nice identifying marks or anything.” He looked at the lieutenant, a little resentfully. “You and I sure get the screwy ones, Loot,” he said. “And no breaks.”

  They left Kenman to carry on with the routine. There wasn’t, Weigand told Mullins, anything more for them at the house, for the moment anyway. They swung away from the curb and headed toward the Parkway. They were about to enter it when Weigand stopped, sat for a moment with his hands resting idly on the wheel, and then backed the Buick away from the Parkway and swung it to face north again.