Death Has a Small Voice (7 page)

“The speakers,” Bernard Wilson said, “are, in order of appearance, Alec Lyster, who sometimes confuses himself with another Alec, and Miss Madeleine Barclay, who also acts.” He then looked slightly embarrassed. He was afraid, he said, that he didn't remember the captain's name. Bill supplied it.

“He's investigating the burglary,” Professor Wilson explained. The gray-haired woman joined by nodding her coiffed head.

“Hilda's gone south,” the dark man said. “One of those places in Virginia, West Virginia—somewhere like that. Went Sunday.”

He stopped. He lifted a glass and put it down. Bill Weigand slid onto a stool. He gave attention to the dark man.

“My name's Shaw,” he said. “Garnett Shaw.” He indicated the woman with the gray hair—with gray hair and a young face, clean jawline, smooth throat. “Mrs. Shaw. Alfrieda Shaw.” He paused a moment; seemed to be waiting.

“I'm a sculptor,” Mrs. Shaw said, in a voice as clear as glass. “Garry thinks everybody knows about it, Captain Weigand. Speak your piece, Garry.”

“No piece,” Garrett Shaw said. His voice was heavy. It almost rumbled. “Hilda had dinner with my wife and me Saturday night. I took her home after.”

“Her errant footsteps,” Alec Lyster said, in an aside, to nobody. “Shut up, Lyster,” the red-haired girl said. “Let the man talk. Then you talk and then I'll talk and then—” Alec Lyster looked at her; his mouth winked at her. She quit talking.

“I'm interested in anything you can tell me, Mrs. Shaw,” Captain Weigand of the New York City police said, in character.

“If my bright young friends—” Shaw said. “I'll try to. Not that it's anything to tell.” He looked at Weigand with sudden curiosity. “Come to think of it,” he said, “haven't I heard of you? Read about you? Aren't you a homicide man?”

“Right,” Bill said. “I am.”

They all looked at him, then. There was surprise, and enquiry, on five faces.

“D'you mean something's wrong with Hilda?” Lyster asked. His voice was quick, sharp; it was as if he had, on the moment, come awake from a contented doze. The others waited. Bill Weigand shook his head.

“The man who broke into her house was killed sometime Sunday night,” Weigand said. “We're trying to trace his actions up to the time he was killed. Probably the murder had no connection with the burglary. There's no reason it should have had. The point it, we don't know when he broke into the house. It might help to know.”

“Oh,” Lyster said. “That's all it is?”

“Right,” Bill said. “All I know of. Do you mind, Mr. Shaw?”

Shaw did not mind.

Hilda Godwin had dined with the Shaws Saturday night. There had been two other couples; the man they had invited for Hilda had, at the last moment, been unable to come. “Chap named Rogers,” Shaw said. “Gilbert Rogers. With her publishers.”

“I've met Mr. Rogers,” Weigand said. He waited.

Around ten or so, one of the couples had left. “They've got kids and the baby sitter was running out,” Shaw said. Half an hour or later, the second couple had left.

“The three of us sat around and talked until—what time would you say, Frieda?”

“About midnight,” Alfrieda Shaw said;

“Just about,” her husband agreed. “So nothing would do but I take her home. The girl's been all over by herself, but I have to take her from Gramercy Park to Elm Lane.”

“I thought it would be a nice thing to do,” Alfrieda Shaw said, in her glass-clear voice.

“For me to do,” Shaw said. “Anyway, I did. Took her home in a cab, helped her out of the cab, spread my coat over a mud puddle—”

“Really, Garry,” Mrs. Shaw said.

“—carried her over the threshold, set her down in the hall, helped her off with her coat—”

“I wager you did, at that,” Alec Lyster said. “You think, Frieda?”

Alfrieda Shaw was, lightly, sure of it.

“When you're all done,” Shaw said, his deep voice rumbling.

“They're done, Garry,” Madeline Barclay said. Such bright people.”

“I intend,” Lyster said, formally, “only the most innocent of malice. I am sure I speak for all of us.”

Shaw sighed deeply. He waited; he waited a little longer than he needed.

“Hilda said she had a notion to go south,” Shaw said, then. “Said she'd just had it. Then she said, ‘You know, I think I will. Tomorrow. The Homestead or some place like that.' I said something or other—probably that it was a good idea, and that I wished Frieda and I could do the same. Then I left.”

“This was in the hall?” Weigand asked.

“We may have stepped into the living room,” Shaw said. “The hall's so small you damn near have to.”

“And you didn't see any signs that the place had been broken into?” Weigand asked.

Shaw shook his square head. “So far as you know, Miss Godwin didn't?”

Shaw was sure she hadn't. She hadn't, of course, had an opportunity to look around. They were talking; then he left.

“You didn't happen to notice whether there was a Voice-Scriber there?” Bill asked. “You know the device I mean?”

“Yes,” Shaw said. “I didn't notice one way or another.”

“Does any of you know where she works?” Bill asked. “I mean—in the living room? Upstairs? I've never been in the house, you know.”

“Ground floor,” Alec Lyster said. “Desk there, typewriter that dropped into the desk, y'know, this dictating thing on a table.”

“I didn't see it,” Shaw said. “I didn't notice one way or the other. If it had been stolen then—it was stolen?”

“Right,” Bill said.

“—Hilda evidently didn't notice it while I was there,” Shaw finished. “That's all I know about it.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Thank you, Mr. Shaw. We'll try to find Miss Godwin.”

“I still don't see—” Shaw began.

“No,” Bill said. “Well?” He looked around.

“I think,” Lyster said, “that you have pumped us dry, Captain. Speaking of drought?”

Bill Weigand thanked him and said, “No.” He had, he added, to be getting along.

“And so do I,” Wilson said. “So do I.”

Weigand paid and Bernard Wilson paid. They walked together to the door of the restaurant. Wilson said that he was afraid they hadn't helped particularly. “You hoped to find Miss Godwin there?” he added, as they stood outside. He had, Bill Weigand said, been told he might.

“Three evenings out of five, at least,” Wilson said. “Lyster most evenings he's in town, usually with Madeleine. The Shaws, usually. Your friend Rogers drops in now and then; sometimes brings Hilda.”

“Not my friend,” Weigand said. “I met him this afternoon. Well—”

“He's quite taken with our Hilda, you know,” Wilson said. “But then, so many are. And have been. Well, good evening, Captain.”

He went off up the street, his topcoat neatly folded over his left arm. Bill Weigand went to his car. In it, he went to his office. He returned to neglected routine; he heard what there was to hear about Harry Eaton, which was considerable, but inconclusive. He had, apparently, been alive and reasonably well as late as Sunday afternoon; he lunched (hamburger and coffee) at a drugstore counter on Bleecker Street. During the late afternoon, he apparently had had visitors. One of them, the couple who had the flat next his thought, had been a woman. They had heard a woman talking, and a man they did not think was Eaton. They had not heard anything that was said.

There was a report that little Harry had had trouble with his landlord, but the landlord denied this. There was another rumor, harder to come by, more elusive, that he had been having trouble with a man known to be a fence (but not, as yet, provably so known) who, in turn, was believed to be connected with an outfit of heroin dis tributors. That might be interesting, if true.

Pam North had still not returned to her apartment. The alarm was out for her; the M.P.B. was making special efforts. Bill Weigand swore at that. He gave the Bureau the additional job of finding out, without a public alarm and if it could, where in the mid-south Hilda Godwin had gone.

She had not returned to her little house. Telephone calls had been made to it from time to time, and had gone unanswered. The patrolman on the beat was keeping an eye on the house, and had not been rewarded.

Bill Weigand summoned Mullins. He wanted what could be discovered, quietly, about one Alec Lyster, apparently British, and one Garrett Shaw. Both frequenters of the Four Corners in Greenwich Village; one married to a sculptor, apparently well known; the other often with one Madeleine Barclay, apparently an actress. All four friends of Hilda Godwin. He would like to know, also, what could, without disturbing anyone's serenity, be found out about Professor Bernard Wilson of Dyckman University, and Gilbert Rogers, of the Hudson Press.

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. But he raised heavy eyebrows and waited.

“To be quite honest, Mullins, I don't know,” Bill told him. He drummed on his desk with his fingers.

“Mrs. North'll be O.K.,” Mullins said. “She always is.”

“Always has been,” Weigand corrected. “I hope you're right.”

Mullins went. Bill Weigand telephoned his wife and said he would be late. After a moment of hesitation, he told her why.

“Oh—
Bill!
” Dorian Weigand said. “Not Pam!”

“She'll be all right,” Bill said. “She always is.”

He went out for food he didn't want.

V

Tuesday, 10:40
P
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M
. to Wednesday 1:25
A
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M
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TWA Flight 36, the San Francisco Sky Chief, banked and turned, dropped toward lighted runways of La Guardia Airport. It touched down and rolled; it turned and taxied back. Gerald North was one of the first out of the Constellation. He found a telephone booth and dialed, and waited. He heard the signal of the telephone ringing. He heard it for a long time, but it did not stop. He dialed another number, and it was quickly answered.

But Bill Weigand was not there. Mullins was not there. Jerry talked to Sergeant Stein.

“Nothing yet,” Stein said. “She'll be all right, Mr. North. We'll find her.”

“Yes,” Jerry said. “Sure.”

But it wasn't yes. It wasn't sure. He got a taxicab and gave an address. “Make it as fast as you can,” he told the driver. “Sure,” the driver said, “fast as I can, bud.” But the cab crept to the Triborough, crept down the East Side. In front of the apartment house, Jerry gave the driver a bill. “Hey, bud,” the driver said after him, but not in a tone that insisted he be heard. In a hurry to keep his date, bud was—in five dollars' worth of hurry.

There was no date, except with the cats. They greeted him, were at first ignored. They protested loudly; they followed Jerry North—a friend turned strange, paying no attention to cats—from room to room. Finally Jerry looked at them.

“Damn you,” Jerry said. “Why can't you talk? You were here. Why can't you talk?”

They talked enough. It did no good.

Across a continent, Jerry North had driven a great plane with his urgency. In Chicago, while the plane fueled, he had walked back and forth, back and forth, lighting, dragging at, stepping on, cigarettes. When the plane was again in the air, he drove it on.

He would get home. He would find Pam. She would be in the apartment, waiting. He had only to get there. If she were not there—
but she would be, had to be
—he would find her. He would know what to do, where to look. It would be all right, once he was home again.

But the apartment was strange. Familiar chairs, familiar sofas were strange, not his—not anybody's. He was a man who had run across a continent, and run to nothingness. Jerry North sat suddenly in a chair by the telephone. He lighted a cigarette, not noticing he did so. Strange cats sat in a circle around him, staring through cats' flat eyes.

He dialed again. Captain Weigand was still out. He would be told Mr. North had called. Mullins was out. Sergeant Stein had gone off duty.

“All right,” Jerry North said, dully. “I'll call again.”

He put the receiver back in the cradle. The bell under it rang shrilly. Jerry's left hand leaped to the telephone. Suddenly, he had too little breath to speak with. He said, “Yes?”

It was not Pam. The voice was a man's, heavy, unfamiliar.

“Mr. North?” the voice said.

“Yes.”

“This is Helder,” the voice said. “Sven Helder. You know? At the building.”

“Yes,” Jerry said. “What is it, Helder?”

“I got to wondering,” Helder said. “Mrs. North got home all right last night?”

“What?” Jerry said. His voice was quick again.

“Mrs. North,” Helder said. “She was here last night. Up at your office. She got home all right, didn't she?”

“She was there?” Jerry said. “At the office? No—she didn't get home all right. We're trying to find her.”

There was a brief pause.

“Well,” Helder said, “she was here and she left all right. Anyway, I thought—I tell you how it was. I got worried. She was—”

“Wait!” Jerry said. “You're there now?”

“Sure,” Helder said.

“Stay there,” Jerry told him. “I'm coming up. You'll stay there?”

“Sure,” Helder said. “I got to, anyway. I got—”

Jerry North did not wait. He cradled the telephone. He went hatless, without a coat. He thought an empty cab would never come along Sixth Avenue. But one came.

The glass doors of the building were closed. There was a dim light in the lobby. Jerry put a finger on the night bell and held it there. Sven Helder came through the lobby, lifting a suspender strap over his shoulder. He peered through the glass. He nodded. He took keys from his pocket, slowly. He selected a key; he peered at it and shook his head. He turned the bunch of keys slowly in his hands and chose another. To this one, unhurriedly, he nodded. Finally, he opened the doors.