Death of an Angel (6 page)

At five-thirty, Pam, having filled a container with ice, put cocktail glasses in the freezing compartment and sliced lemon peel—and her left index finger, but very slightly—opened Jerry's door and said, “Hey!”

“Why,” Jerry said, “can't Braithwaite ever remember what his characters look like? Here on page two hundred and sixty-one he says—”

“I know, dear,” Pam said. “It'll be time for cocktails when you've showered. Everything's out.”

Jerry looked at her. He said he saw she had sliced the lemon peel. “Oh that,” Pam said. “It's nothing, really. I just put it on to keep the air out. If you don't hurry, we'll miss the news. Even if it isn't Banghart on Saturdays.”

Jerry, within reason, hurried. It was five minutes before six when he poured martinis into frosted glasses and twisted lemon peel over them, and caressed the rim of each glass with the bruised peel. In such matters, he is ritualistic. It was precisely at six that he turned on the radio, at six-sixty on his dial, and was promised the news, which would be brought to him by a cigar.

It was not, however, until six-eleven that the announcer, who was not Mr. Banghart, said, “Now for some names in the news. Bradley Fitch, whose engagement to Naomi Shaw, the star of Broadway's hit play,
Around the Corner
, was just announced, was found dead today in his Park Avenue apartment. Mr. Fitch, who was the only son and heir of the late Cyrus Fitch, was an internationally known polo player. Death apparently was due to natural causes.”

“Oh!” Pam said, “how dread—” and was interrupted by Jerry's commanding right hand.

“—has just come in,” the announcer was saying, “from the NBC news-room. The police report the death of Bradley Fitch as suspicious and have started an investigation. The weather and our windup story after these few words about—”

“Jerry!”
Pam said. “How—
awful
. They were so happy and—oh,
Jerry
.” And then Pam began to dab her eyes with the nearest thing available, which happened to be a tiny cocktail napkin.

Jerry moved to her and patted her shoulder and, for want of anything better to say, said, “There. There.”

“Such dreadful things happen,” Pam North said, and reached up and held to Jerry's hand.

It was much later that Pam said, after a considerable period of abstraction, that, if it had to happen, it was too bad it had happened on Park Avenue.

“Because that's Homicide East, isn't it?” she said. “So Bill won't be in it.”

“Nor,” Jerry said, and was firm, “will we.” But his firmness lessened. “Unless Sam's—” he began, and the apartment bell rang. Jerry went to the door.

Acting Captain William Weigand, Homicide, Manhattan West, looked, to Jerry, a little grave, and also a little puzzled. Sergeant Aloysius Mullins, standing behind Weigand, appeared to be worried.

“Come on in,” Jerry said. “You're just in time for—”

“Well,” Bill said, “this isn't entirely social. That is—”

He and Mullins came in, and greeted Pam and were greeted by her.

“What it is,” Bill Weigand said. “We found a belonging of yours—I'm pretty sure it's yours—in an odd place. And the inspector knows about it, so—”

He produced a small, white square, a little crumpled—a small square of linen. He held it out to Pam.

“Why,” Pam said, “it's one of my cocktail napkins. Like this one.” She showed another square of white, even more crumpled. “Except I've been crying into this one,” Pam said. “See? They both have the ‘N' in the corner. And the Siamese cat.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “I did see that, Pam. How do you suppose it got in Bradley Fitch's apartment? In the room he died in?”

4

Saturday, 6:45
P.M.
to 9:20
P.M.

Pam North said, “In Mr.
Fitch's
apartment?” and then, “They're like match folders, really. Where they are doesn't prove anything.”

The three men waited.

“We turn up with matches advertising drive-ins in Nevada,” Pam said. “How, we never know. You read about match covers being clues, but how do you explain Nevada?”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. “We—”

Pam North agreed her comparison was extreme. But, she said, when they went places, Jerry was as likely as not to put a cocktail napkin in his pocket—“when there are too many things for his hands”—and to forget to take it out and to bring it home. It was sent to the laundry—“if it's not paper, which they usually are”—and in time returned to owners. “If we remember.”

“Has Fitch been here?” Bill asked, simply.

“No,” Pam said. “We only met him the other night. But—” She stopped.

“It's no use, Pam,” Jerry said, and then, to Weigand, “Sam Wyatt?”

“He was there,” Bill said. “This morning. He and the housekeeper found Mr. Fitch—dead. Wyatt was here?”

“Last night,” Jerry said. “About this time. Somebody killed Fitch?”

“We don't know yet,” Bill said.

“But,” Pam said, “it's
Park
Avenue. At least the radio said it was. And you're always the other side of Fifth.”

At the moment, Bill told them, he wasn't. He was working out of Homicide East. It was temporary; it resulted from emergency leaves, added to normal leaves.

“Since we didn't take the napkin there,” Jerry said, “and you know we didn't, how about a drink?”

Mullins looked thirstily at Weigand, who hesitated, shrugged. “What Art don't know won't hurt us,” Mullins said, and Weigand smiled slightly, said it had been a long day, said, finally, “Why not?” A few minutes later, Pam said, “Now,” and, when Weigand hesitated just perceptibly, added, “After all, it's our napkin.”

“I'd tell you anyway, I suppose,” Bill said. “It's got to be a habit. So far—”

So far, it was merely a suspicious death. It had taken toxicological examination to make it that, although the first physician called—a heart specialist, who had offices in the Park Avenue apartment house—had had his doubts from the beginning. A corrosive poison was an obvious possibility. But so was some violent digestive attack, perhaps resulting from food poisoning. The physician had reported. An ambulance had come, and the police with it, and a medical examiner shortly thereafter. The medical examiner had called it poison, and then it really started. When Weigand and Mullins came into it, from Homicide East, with the precinct men and, a little later, a team from the District Attorney's Homicide Bureau, with an assistant district attorney. And men from the Police Laboratory. The autopsy was hurried; it was not waited for. By the time the preliminary report came from Bellevue, they were well into it. The preliminary report showed oxalic acid.

“But,” Pam said, at that point, “I never thought of that as a poison—not as a real poison.” She paused a moment. “I suppose,” she said, “because my grandfather used to use it to clean his straw hat. It seems so—domestic.”

It was, in a sense, Bill agreed. It was also a poison, and a fairly violent one. Half an ounce would kill; an eighth of an ounce had been known to kill. The amount it had taken to kill Bradley Fitch was not yet determined. Since he had died rather quickly—within, it appeared, not more than half an hour after ingestion—it was probable that the amount taken had been large. He had taken it on an empty stomach; in a concoction apparently intended as a hangover remedy.

And the method of taking was one of the things which cast doubt on the simplest solution, which would have been suicide. Oxalic acid, because it can be procured easily and at small expense (which is not infrequently an item) had once been often used by suicides. In recent years, this had not been so true.

“People don't wear straw hats so much,” Pam said, and to this, after a slight start, the others agreed. It might well be that the acid was, as a result of the decline in straw hats, less often readily available in the home.

“People used it for ink stains, though,” Mullins said. Weigand looked at him. Mullins said, “O.K., Loot.”

A man ready to kill himself would not, it was to be presumed, bother to concoct a hangover remedy, since the cure he planned for other woes would serve for all. The other arguments against suicide were obvious. To all appearances, Fitch had been a man with few troubles and much to anticipate—specifically, marriage to Naomi Shaw. (But appearances, as all know—and as policemen know better than most—are not always trustworthy.)

But further, it appeared that somebody had been with Fitch shortly before (if not actually at the time) he drank the poison. Somebody, at any rate, had rung the bell at the upstairs door. So Mrs. Rose Hemmins testified. He explained Mrs. Hemmins. She had heard the sound of footsteps, and had supposed they were those of Fitch, on his way to open the door.

Weigand interrupted himself there to ask what they knew of the Fitch apartment. “Since you were at this celebration,” he added.

They knew, Jerry told him, only a foyer and two rooms, both large, both party rooms.

“And,” Pam said, “that the elevator doesn't stop anywhere else, which was most impressive. I mean, when it stops at that floor, of course. You walk right into the apartment, or almost. Instead of a corridor and a lot of doors with letters. Like here.”

It was all rather impressive, Bill Weigand agreed. Impressive and a little archaic. He did not suppose that there were now in New York many apartments like the one in which Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Fitch, emanating the warm glow of great wealth, had installed themselves just before the first world war and ten years or so before the birth of their only child. There had been more such apartments then, and for some years thereafter, but even by the twenties the number had been dwindling.

“Not enough servants any more,” Pam said. “Or, I suppose, children either.”

Weigand supposed so. It takes a good many servants to staff a duplex apartment of sixteen rooms, several of them disproportionately large. It takes a large family, if people are not to rattle. It takes also, and obviously, a great deal of money, and a corresponding scale of life. “And,” Pam pointed out, “not so much living in the country.”

Again she was agreed with. So, most such apartments had been cut up into smaller ones. That of the Fitch family had not, although the family, properly speaking, had been reduced to one man. Bradley Fitch had maintained the big place, which occupied a good part of the eighth floor and of the ninth in the twelve-story building. It had entrances on both floors; was internally connected by two stair flights (family and staff) and a dumbwaiter, which had apparently not been used for years. Fitch's own quarters had been on the ninth floor, with other bedrooms and baths; the lower floor was devoted to living areas, a big kitchen, and servants' rooms. Both floors had windows on Park and on the side street—and on a large air shaft.

“So,” Bill said, “people who wanted to call on Fitch, and knew their way around, went directly to the ninth floor and he let them in there.” Apparently, if the housekeeper was right, somebody had that morning, at eleven or a little before.

“Then you don't know it was Sam,” Pam said, and Bill Weigand said they did not, as yet,
know
it was anybody. Certainly, it did not appear to have been Sam Wyatt. Wyatt had showed up half an hour later, and at the downstairs door. He had been let in by the housekeeper, Mrs. Hemmins; with her, he had found Bradley Fitch dead on the floor. It had been he who had gone to a telephone and called a doctor. He had been present still when the police arrived, had told them what he knew, had been asked to wait, in case Homicide had further questions. He had, by choice, waited in the anteroom on which the elevator opened. There, Bill Weigand had talked to him.

It did not appear that he had much of importance to contribute. He had dropped around, on the chance of finding Fitch available. He had been shocked—shocked as Mrs. Hemmins had been—to find what they did in the upstairs study. He was now more shocked than ever to hear that Fitch had been poisoned.

He had not been asked about the cocktail napkin, since it had not been found—more precisely, had not been identified—when he was talked to by Weigand and Mullins. The napkin had been picked up in the course of the thorough—the incredibly thorough—examination given a room in which murder has been done. Weigand had identified it as he checked over articles arranged for his viewing. But that had been later.

Wyatt had been asked why he had wanted to talk to Fitch at, for both of them, a comparatively early hour. He had said, at first, “Business,” and then, when Weigand and Mullins waited, Mullins' pencil poised over his notebook, Wyatt had amplified. It had been about the play.

“About its closing, of course,” Pam said. “We know about that. Sam was here because of that. When he must have picked up the napkin.”

It had been about
Around the Corner
, and its closing. Wyatt had explained the situation. He had decided to make, alone and with Fitch alone—“no man's himself with a girl like Nay around,” he had explained to Weigand—one more effort to persuade Fitch to be reasonable; to, at least, let Nay remain in the play for another six months. “It seems,” Weigand said, “it will make all the difference to a movie sale.”

Pam did not see why that would be true; Jerry, after a few moments of thought, said it might. In New York,
Around the Corner
could hardly be more highly thought of. But it had been on Broadway only briefly; there had hardly been time for the rest of the country to hear of it. Motion picture producers, particularly in these days, bid against one another only for those “properties” which were almost universally known. “Like,” Jerry said—“oh, like Lindbergh's memoirs.” Or, to go back a few years,
Life with Father
. It was when there was bidding that the money rolled in.