Death Takes a Bow (10 page)

She looked at Weigand firmly. Weigand said she was very wise. She nodded.

“However,” she said, “there were a great many people in the lounge and all of them wanted to meet Mr. Sproul and after a while I thought so many people might not be good for him. I find that lecturers usually like to have a few minutes of repose before they speak.”

Weigand nodded.

“So I suggested he might prefer to go to the speakers' room and he agreed,” Mrs. Williams continued. She was being a very good witness. “He left his drink after taking only a few sips and when I noticed this, in the speakers' room, I naturally suggested that he have another. He decided that he would and I called the bar steward, who sent up another brandy, and soda. Miss Shaw, who I gathered was an old friend of Mr. Sproul's, was waiting in the speakers' room when we got there. Mr. North came five or ten minutes later. We talked until it was time to go on the stage.”

Weigand nodded. He said she was very helpful.

“During that time did anything odd happen?” he asked. “I don't know what sort of odd thing I mean. Anything you noticed. Did Sproul seem upset at all?”

“He seemed very gay,” Mrs. Williams said. “In excellent spirits—quite unlike most of our lecturers, who are inclined to be—a little morose before they go on. I noticed that, particularly. But I can't say it was odd. Perhaps Mr. Sproul was always in good spirits. I was not familiar with his usual manners, remember.”

The counsellor-at-law qualified, keeping the testimony neat around the edges. Weigand was appreciative.

“Did you have another ginger-ale in the speakers' room, Mrs. Williams,” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“I don't know why,” Weigand told her. “I wondered.”

This struck Mrs. Williams, it was apparent, as irregular. It seemed to confirm a rather low opinion she had formed of Lieutenant Weigand, as a frivolous man. She stood up. Weigand stood with her.

“Yes,” he said, “that is all, Mrs. Williams. Thank you.”

She left and Mullins joined Weigand in looking after her.

“Quite a dame,” Mullins said. “Quite an old dame.”

Not so old, Weigand told him. Thirty-five, at a guess. “A very precise person,” Weigand said. “We must try to be more precise ourselves, Sergeant.”

Mullins looked doubtful, and finally said, “O.K., Loot.”

So they had Sproul's activities charted from about 7:45 to the time of his death. Now they would work back. Then the telephone rang. Weigand said “Yes?” to Dr. Jerome Francis.

“It was morphine, all right,” Dr. Francis told him. “A lot of it. Plus, evidently, a special sensitivity—what you'd call an allergy, probably.”

“Would I?” Weigand said.

“Sure,” Francis told him. “With Sproul a little morphine went a long way. The whole way. Partly because he had a mild heart condition. Partly because—well, his system just didn't resist morphine. And if you want to know why I can't tell you. It was just the kind of a guy he was.”

Weigand assumed that Sproul wasn't, under the circumstances, addicted to morphine. Dr. Francis snorted mildly and said of course not.

“He'd have died first,” Dr. Francis said. “Literally.”

Weigand thanked the assistant medical examiner and cradled the telephone. So it wasn't natural causes. It was suicide or murder, and you could take your choice. And he, as the policeman responsible, had to take the choice and prove it.

“What've we got, Sergeant?” Weigand asked Mullins. “Did he jump or was he pushed?”

“Hell,” Mullins said. “Who'd suicide before a mob? He was pushed.”

Weigand found he thought so, too. He nodded.

“Can you picture our Mrs. Williams going all soft over some guy in a restaurant?” he asked. “And getting a little high in the process?”

Mullins said “Hell, no.”

“Pam North thinks she saw Mrs. Williams doing just that,” Weigand said. Mullins looked puzzled.

“Mrs. North said that?” he repeated. Weigand nodded. Mullins shook his head slowly.

“I don't get it,” he said. “But if Mrs. North says so.” He looked at Weigand. “Sometimes I get the idea Mrs. North ain't as screwy as she sounds,” he confided. Weigand pretended astonishment. He said, “Not really, Sergeant!” Mullins nodded. “Sometimes I do,” he insisted. “But it's hard to see the Williams dame unlaxing.”

It was, Weigand agreed. But it was merely an interesting side issue; one of those things which cropped up when you had to stir people around during an investigation. One of those oddities which had, in the end, nothing to do with the main issue, but which had to be noted down all the same, because you were finished before you knew what was important and what trivial. So—

It was almost an hour later, and Weigand sat staring at his notes—the cryptic, fragmentary notes which he kept for his own reminders, supplementing Mullins record. Weigand stared at his notes and Mullins stared at Weigand. Finally Mullins said one word.

“People!” Mullins remarked.

Weigand nodded slowly. People indeed. People who had known Sproul and known one another; people who had sat and answered questions, telling what they wanted to tell but sometimes revealing more. The Akrons, brother and sister; George Schwartz, summoned from a copy desk, and flaring in sudden anger at a dead man; Ralph White, a large man who looked as if he lived on a small income and who had an odd, heavy expansiveness about him; Loretta Shaw again, to say, “So what?” to a question Weigand asked her; Y. Charles Burden, back unexpectedly and without summons, to give a warning which seemed at first glance to have no purpose, but which must have had. And finally Bandelman Jung of the unlikely name, who was, beyond question, a little dark man. But
the
little dark man?

“People,” Weigand agreed.

“The Akron dame,” Mullins remarked, a little querulously. “And her brother. If he is her brother.”

Weigand nodded. She had been tall and almost sedate when she entered, had the Akron girl. Fair and tall, with a broad forehead and taffy-colored hair lying in braids, unfashionably but with effectiveness, around her head. She had been slow to answer and calm and she had known Victor Leeds Sproul in Paris. She had been living in Paris when he was there; she had returned, it became unexpectedly reasonable to suppose, when he returned. She had been doing nothing in Paris, except living there.

It was she, jumping down to the present, who had planned the dinner for Sproul which was in a fashion a reunion and, in a fashion, a celebration of Sproul's new career. A celebration in advance, of a career markedly aborted.

“Poor Victor,” she said, sitting serenely. “Poor Victor. He was looking forward to it, I think.”

Her voice was sober, as became a voice in the presence of sudden death. But it did not, it seemed to Weigand, reveal any sense of personal bereavement. Sproul, it appeared from words and tones, was a friend who had remained an acquaintance to Jean Akron; she was regretful at his taking off, but not greatly moved. She could remember nothing out of the way at the dinner; Sproul had seemed much as he always seemed. Certainly he had not seemed depressed. But he could always hide his feelings. It came over Weigand, listening, that each answer given by Jean Akron served to cancel the preceding answer; each sentence drew a line through the one which had come before. Was she careful? Or, as seemed equally probable, merely negative?

It seemed, Weigand suggested, looking for a spark, unlikely that Sproul would have killed himself when he was about to try something both new and, apparently, interesting and when he was about to marry. Miss Akron had known he was about to marry.

“Oh,” she said, “we all knew that. Or that he said he was.”

“Do you mean,” Weigand pressed, “that you thought he really wasn't?”

The placid girl seemed faintly, but only faintly, surprised.

“Why, no,” she said. “Why should I think that?”

(Mullins had looked at her then, evidently puzzled. He had lifted his head, and his pencil from his notebook, and stared at her. She had not seemed conscious of the stare.)

She knew Loretta Shaw, of course; she was very fond of Loretta. But she did not really know her well; they had met often in Paris, but had never been close friends.

“We are so different,” Jean Akron explained. (Her tone might have thrown the onus for that difference on Loretta Shaw. But it might have implied no onus. Recalling, Weigand was not certain. But he was left, and of this he was certain, with the belief that Miss Akron had not really liked the slight, vivid girl who said she was soon to have married Sproul.)

Jean Akron had not—as now Weigand led her into the past—known Sproul before he went to Paris. Weigand looked at her, guessed her age as the middle twenties, and said “of course not.” She had met him in Paris through her brother, who had known him somewhere in the United States—she was uncommonly vague just there—and had run into him when he was visiting her.

“When my brother was visiting me,” she explained. “He didn't live in Paris, of course. He was there on business.”

She did not know of any reason for anyone to have killed Sproul, if he had been killed. She knew Mr. Burden slightly and thought him a “very pleasant man” and added, with an inflection, “but so dynamic.” She knew George Schwartz, then a name to Weigand, and Ralph White, another name. But she did not seem to know any of them well. Weigand let her go and had her brother in.

(“If he is her brother,” Mullins said, when Weigand, reviewing for both of them, brought up his name. Weigand nodded.)

It had seemed a question, certainly. Herbert Akron was at least fifteen years older than his sister. He had a sharp face and a high, domed forehead from which the hair receded, shrinking back from the edge of a precipice. He sat down, but sat restlessly. At almost every pause he scratched the thin hair over his right ear, but it was evident that he quieted no itch, except the itch to move his hand. And almost from the start he began to snarl.

He did not see, to begin with, what business Weigand had bothering him. “Or Jean,” he added. “We hardly knew the heel.”

“Heel?” Weigand repeated.

Herbert Akron's voice rasped as he described the kind of heel.

“We never saw him,” he asserted. But then he admitted that they had seen him at dinner that evening. They “couldn't get out of it.” It did not appear why they could not get out of it. “So we sat around listening to the pompous fool tell what a knock-out he was going to be in front of the women's clubs. He—he gloated over it.”

Akron's tone was contemptuous.

“And all the while he was planning to take poison,” Akron added, making the act of suicide an offense against the dignity of the Akrons. “Damned exhibitionist.”

It was interesting to search out the root of this animosity. Weigand prodded around the base of Akron, looking for a lead. For a long time he was unsuccessful. But he discovered other things, some of which he wanted. He discovered that Akron headed a small, but growing, factory in New Jersey, which made a part—a very secret part, Akron indicated—for several bomber factories. He discovered that Akron and his sister shared an apartment on Park Avenue, not too far up. And he discovered that Akron's tone changed when he spoke of his sister. It was hard, for a while, to put a finger on the nature of the change.

Now and then, it developed, Akron and his sister entertained in their apartment people Jean had known in Paris. Akron spoke of such entertainments, and of the people, with contempt.

“Something Jean wanted,” he said. “A pretentious bunch, all of them.”

Sproul was there sometimes.

“I thought you never saw him;” Weigand said.

“As seldom as possible,” Akron assured him. “Only when we couldn't get out of it.”

But again it was not apparent what had kept them from getting out of it. It was not apparent, indeed, what had kept Akron from getting out of entertaining his sister's Paris friends. It was not clear why Akron's nerves were so on edge, why his voice rasped so. Unless edgy nerves and a rasping voice were part of Akron, as they might be.

“Of course,” he said, “he hung around as much as he could. Everybody knew that.”

“Hung around?” Weigand repeated. “Sproul hung around? You?”

The tone was not incredulous; the tone could hardly be said to exist.

“Jean,” Akron told him. “There was no secret about that. But he never got anywhere. I kept an eye on him.”

Weigand let his voice sound puzzled.

“I understood,” he said, “that Sproul was engaged to be married. To a Miss Shaw—Loretta Shaw, isn't it?”

Akron sneered. There was, Weigand decided, no other word to fit it. Akron drew one corner of his mouth down in derision and let the other corner curl up. It was quite a face to make, Weigand thought.

“Eye-wash,” Akron told him. “Sproul wasn't marrying anybody. Not the Shaw girl. Not Jean. He was a heel.”

Weigand waited a minute.

“Did he want to marry Miss Akron?” he inquired.

Akron said, “Hell, no.”

“Not
marry
,” he added. His emphasis completed the remark. But he completed it in words. “A week end was about his speed,” he said.

There was a kind of viciousness in his tone. “It sounded like his sister was his wife,” Mullins said, summing up. “You'd have figured he was jealous.”

(Weigand looked at him and smiled faintly. He did not answer.)

It had been then, unexpectedly, that Y. Charles Burden opened the door from the stage to the speakers' room and came in without apology. Weigand looked at him without friendliness. Burden looked at Akron, ignoring the detectives.

“You,” he said. “Shooting off your mouth again, probably. Getting Jean into a mess.”

Akron looked at him and his mouth twisted.

“Sir Galahad,” he said. He stared at Burden. “I'll take care of my sister,” he told the lecture agent. “I don't need any small-time Barnums.”