Death of an Angel (19 page)

Bill had, before, run into such people as these. They had proved not so much puzzling as elusive. You sought to put a finger on them, and they were not there. They were performing versions of themselves; they were writing characters for themselves, and scenes for the characters to play. Wyatt, now—imagining himself arrested, imagining himself in the death cell at Sing Sing, filling in all the details, presumably with dialogue. Living it all out in his mind. James Thurber's Walter Mitty? Or a man staring, hopelessly, into a future shaped by his own actions? “Figments within figments,” Pam North had said. Sometimes things Pam said kept going round and round in the mind like—like rolling drops of mercury. “Figments within—”

A cab stopped behind Bill's Buick. Bill watched it in the mirror. A tall man, a little stooped, a bare-headed man with dark hair, got out of the cab and paid, and went up the sandstone steps. The cab pulled out, went on through Bank Street. Bill allowed several minutes. He went back to the dark vestibule, and lighted another match, and pressed the proper button. After a little time, the door in front of him clicked, in apparent excitement. Bill climbed stairs—the house listed to his right, and the stairs were tilted accordingly—to the third floor. Wesley Strothers stood in a doorway with the light behind him. He said, “Yes?” He listened. He said, “Sure. But isn't it pretty late?” He was told there were just a few points.

The apartment comprised two small rooms, with a kitchenette behind a curtain in a corner of one, and a bathroom between. The floors of both rooms canted, in accordance with the weary subsidence of the elderly house. The furniture was worn. Bill, directed, sat in what would, he supposed, be described as a “comfortable old chair.” He found it merely old.

“Not much of a place, is it?” Wesley Strothers said. He had a deep, pleasant voice. He was, Bill realized, younger than one thought on seeing him first. The stoop misled, probably. And deep-set eyes somehow suggest advancing years. At a guess—a second guess—Wesley Strothers was not over forty. Perhaps he was a few years under forty. “Lived here for five-six years,” Strothers said. “Waiting for a hit. Or for the place to fall down. I'd begun to think it would fall down first, and then Sammy came along with this script of his.” He paused. “Well?” he said.

“Probably you'll move now,” Bill said.

“First of October,” Strothers said. “God, yes.”

“Now that the play is going to keep running?”

“You people get around, don't you?” Strothers said. “Look, can't I get you something. Brandy? Or coffee, for that matter?”

Bill shook his head, while saying, “Thanks, no.”

He wouldn't mind, he was told, if Strothers made himself coffee. “Drink a lot of coffee.” Bill would not. He watched Strothers, who pulled back the curtain of the kitchenette, lighted a two-burner stove, put a percolator over the flame. He wiped out the inside of a cup. “Got most of my meals on this until a few months ago,” he said, pointing at the stove. “Eating better, now. But things get dusty. Sure you won't have a cup?”

Bill thanked him again.

Strothers remained by the kitchenette. He looked down at Weigand.

“I'd begun to feel left out,” Strothers said. “Get a long statement from Nay. Put Sammy through it. Must have made him snap his fingers a lot. Writers are funny, but I suppose we've got to have them. Or go back to the
commedia dell'arte
.” He looked at Bill Weigand with sudden doubt. “Improvisation, you know,” he said.

“Yes,” Bill said. “It takes time to get around to everyone, Mr. Strothers. You did give us a statement.”

“That I was here, eating breakfast, when you say poor Brad was killed,” Strothers said. “That I didn't know of any enemies he had.”

“Right,” Bill said.

“Now,” Strothers said, “you want me to go over it in detail, I suppose?”

Absently, Wesley Strothers continued to dust out the inside of the coffee cup. Then he put the cup down and hung the tea-towel on a rod. He shook the percolator slightly, as if to arouse it. He opened the door of the small refrigerator which was under the gas plate and bent down and found what he wanted, and came up with a bottle of cream. Bill waited for the completion of these domestic chores.

“Mrs. Hemmins has been killed,” he said, then, in a conversational tone.

Wesley Strothers put the cream bottle on a counter. He put it there very carefully. He drew in a deep breath. He said, “God!” He said, “Not
Rosie!
”

“Yes,” Bill said. “Rose Hemmins. And her cat. They were both shot.”

The tall, dark man left the kitchenette and took the step or two needed to bring him near the middle of the small room. He stood there, looking down at Bill Weigand from caverned eyes.

“When did it happen? Just a few hours ago she—” He stopped. He shook his head slowly, “Why?” he said. “For God's sake,
why?
”

“I suppose,” Bill said, “because she knew something. Perhaps tried to cash in on what she knew.”

“Rosie?” Strothers said. “It'd be the last—” He did not finish. He gestured bewilderment with both hands. “When did you say it happened?”

“This evening,” Bill told him. “We don't know the exact time. Three or four hours ago, probably. Have you seen her recently, Mr. Strothers?”

Strothers looked down at Weigand, his dark eyes intent, and for a moment did not reply. But then, slowly, he began to nod his head. He pulled a chair around to face Weigand and sat down in the chair.

“Yes,” he said. “This evening. From what you say, it must have been just before she was killed.” He shook his head again. “The poor old thing,” he said. “She was all dressed up. As if she were going out some place. A movie, maybe. And now she's dead. Shot, you said? And—the cat, too?”

“Yes,” Bill said.

“She was fond of the cat,” Strothers told him. “Thought more of the cat than—well, she thought a lot of the cat.” He leaned forward, suddenly. “She was dressed up because somebody was coming,” he said. “Not because she was going out.”

“Probably,” Bill said. “How did you happen to be there, Mr. Strothers?”

Wesley Strothers was staring at the floor. For a moment, it appeared that he had not heard. But then he said, “Oh. I went to see whether she'd work for me this fall.” He looked up. “Housekeeper, you know,” he said. He waved at the apartment. “Going to go the whole hog,” he said. “From rags to riches. From two rooms to five. I'll have to get somebody, and I thought of Rosie.”

He had, he said, thought of her as a possible keeper of his new apartment that evening. He had “had an engagement uptown anyway,” and had left early enough to go by the Park Avenue apartment. He had, he thought, got there around eight. The elevator was unattended and he had ridden up to the eighth floor, rung the doorbell, been admitted by Mrs. Hemmins. He had talked to her briefly. She had agreed to take the job.

“Pleased about it, poor old girl,” Strothers said. “Kept on thanking me—saying she hadn't known what she was going to do or where she was going to go. That sort of thing. Thought once she was—hell, going to kiss me.”

“You talked to her in her room?” Weigand asked.

Strothers said he had not. They had talked—it hadn't taken long—in the room just beyond the entrance foyer.

“I didn't have too much time,” Strothers said. “I had an engagement.”

“With Miss Shaw,” Bill said. “Yes.”

For a moment Strothers looked puzzled. Then he said, “Oh, that fellow East.”

Strothers said he had offered to advance Mrs. Hemmins money to tide her over until she went to work for him, and that she had said that wasn't necessary—yet, anyway. Then Strothers had left.

“When you were with her,” Bill said. “She wasn't carrying anything?”

“Carrying anything?”

When her body was found, Bill told him, she had been clutching a wadded up tea-towel.

Strothers shrugged. He said he didn't remember anything like that. Had she been wearing an apron? Strothers was sure she had not. Did the tea-towel mean anything? Because it seemed to him that there would be a dozen ways of explaining it. Perhaps, for example, she had spilled something on her dress, and had got a towel to wipe it off.

“Perhaps,” Bill said. “At first, she didn't act to you as if she were expecting anyone?”

Strothers looked at the floor again, his eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head. Then he said, “No, I didn't think that, exactly. Not then. Now it's pretty obvious.”

Bill waited. Strothers looked up at him.

“I don't like to say this,” he said. “Probably nothing to it. But—when I was getting a cab after I'd talked to the poor old girl I thought I saw somebody I knew. In front of the building. He was a good way off and I was in a hurry and—you know how it is?” He waited. Bill Weigand waited, too. “Got in the cab and said to myself, ‘Wasn't that Sam Wyatt?'”

“And you couldn't be sure?”

“Nope. Didn't matter anyway. Or—didn't then. Chances are it was just somebody who looked like him. Only—well, there it is. For what it's worth. You can ask him.”

“It was Mr. Wyatt,” Bill told him. “He mentioned seeing you, Mr. Strothers.”

“So? That's what brought you here? Well—I'm glad I didn't try to hide I'd seen her. I thought of it, there for a moment. Thought, what's the use? Just get myself involved. Just as well I didn't. I suppose I oughtn't to tell you I even thought of it.”

It was a very natural impulse, Bill told him; an impulse very wisely resisted.

“So,” Strothers said. “I didn't kill the poor old girl, if that's what you were thinking. Just offered her a job. Left her—smiling. All dressed up and smiling, and with the cat rubbing against her legs, the way they do.” He paused. “You think she knew something? About Brad's death?”

It was, Bill told him, the most likely possibility, and at that Strothers nodded, said he supposed so. He said, “Brad was a hell of a good friend of mine.”

Bill Weigand waited.

“We hit it off,” Strothers said. “One of those things. I went after him for backing, first off. But I got fond of the big goof. Guess he did of me. You know how those things happen, sometimes?”

“Yes.”

“Saw a lot of him. Used to go around with him—him and Phyllis, I and whoever turned up. That was before he fell for Nay, of course. Went on binges together, a few times. At his place, a good deal. Even went out to his Long Island place once or twice but, God, everybody talked about horses. Now and then, as a big concession, about dogs.”

“He planned to marry Miss Shaw,” Bill said. “Take her out of the play. That didn't make any difference?”

“That—” Strothers began, and said, “Wait a minute.” He went back to the kitchenette and poured himself coffee from the bubbling percolator. He added cream. He looked at Bill Weigand, and Bill shook his head once more. Strothers brought his coffee back, and sat down facing Weigand.

“No,” he said. “It didn't make any difference. Hell, who could blame him? Nay's a dish. But—she'd have stayed on in the show. All she had to do was to bring him around. Way he felt, he'd have done whatever she asked, in the end.”

“And—she wanted to stay on?”

“Would have, when she thought about it. One thing about Nay, she's a trouper. At bottom. Take more than getting married to keep her off the stage. Hell—it did before.”

“So you weren't worried?”

“No. I wasn't worried. Poor Sammy may have been. After all, he doesn't know much about show people. First time he's done a play, you know. Also—well, Sammy's an excitable sort of guy. You've seen that, haven't you?”

Bill nodded.

“Between us,” Strothers said, “he's not very well balanced. All that finger snapping. Always imagining things.” He shook his head. “Of course,” he said, “Sammy's a writer. Never knew one that—” He shrugged to finish the sentence. He drank coffee. “Also,” he said, “Sammy didn't know Brad. Brad didn't louse things up for people. Not that sort of guy. But Sammy didn't know him. Well?”

“One other thing,” Bill said. “You were at this stag party Mr. Fitch gave before he died?”

“Sure,” Strothers said. “On top of the world, poor Brad was.”

“Mr. Wyatt was there?”

“For a while. As I remember it, he left early. Early as things go at that kind of binge.”

“You stayed later?”

“A bit later.”

“Mr. Fitch had been drinking a good deal?”

Strothers shook his head. This time he smiled.

“Probably,” he said. “I didn't think about it at the time because—well, he just went along with the rest of us. I'm afraid I—lacked perspective.”

“How about Mr. Wyatt?”

“I don't remember anything special. I suppose he'd had a few. Everybody had.”

Bill Weigand left Mr. Strothers drinking coffee. He went back to his car and to Homicide East. Detective Willings waited for him.

Mr. and Mrs. James Nelson admitted readily that they had been at the apartment; agreed that they had probably arrived a short time before eight; agreed that, leaving, they had found the elevator without an operator and had, themselves, pushed the proper buttons. And—they had seen Mrs. Hemmins, alive and well, and had left her so.

Why had they gone?

They had got to talking, Mrs. Nelson said—then doing the talking for both of them. “He just sat there and nodded; almost went to sleep a couple of times,” Willings reported. They had got to talking about what they would do with that barn of a place, when they took it over.

“They seem pretty sure they're going to take over?”

“Yes sir. You mean they're not going to?”

“I'm afraid they're going to be disappointed, Freddy. Go ahead.”