Death Takes a Bow (21 page)

He guessed the room cars paid off, after all. You didn't have so many people, usually, but they tipped better. You could figure maybe half a dollar a head in from Pittsburgh, or maybe the average was nearer forty cents, because you had to count women traveling alone, who seemed, some of them, to think the car made up beds automatically, and polished shoes by miracle. Still, you got a good tipping class of people in the room cars, ordinarily.

“Thank you, sir,” Wilfred said. “Just pick out your bags please, sir. Thank
you
, sir. There's your big bag right there, sir. Thank you—”

The passengers stood in front of the row of bags and peered at it. Some of them shivered in the air, damp from the rain of the day before. Some of them growled at the red caps, and some were hearty and most of them seemed to be in a hurry. And none of them missed Wilfred's assisting hand.

They stopped coming and Wilfred turned to go back on the car, to strip the beds which had been occupied late, to stow the pillows he had left out so that early risers could rest comfortably while they waited—and some of them had got up as far back as Philadelphia, for reasons which did not appear to Wilfred—and to ride on the Pullman into the Sunnyside yards, and eventually to go home to Harlem. But, turning, Wilfred stopped.

There was still one bag standing on the platform, and a red cap was looking at it doubtfully.

“Somebody miss one,” the red cap said. “Somebody jus' forget all about it.”

The red cap laughed, shrilly, infectiously, at nothing in particular.

“He sho' did,” the red cap repeated. “He jus' forget all about his prop'ty.”

Wilfred did not join in the laugh. It was up to him to retrieve the bag, if he could not find the owner. He would have to turn it in and make out a report, and this would delay his return to Harlem, where he had reasons to want to be as soon as possible. Wilfred scowled at the bag and said that some people was the damnedest fools he evuh saw. To the red cap he said, “You keep your eye on it a minute, huh, big boy?” and went back into the car. Maybe somebody had dropped off to sleep again.

There was nobody in Bedroom A and there was nobody in Bedroom B, but the door of Bedroom C was closed, which was odd, and Wilfred knocked. There was no answer and he pushed it open.

Sure enough, he thought, somebody dropped off to sleep again. That sort of thin man who didn't look so good when he got on at Pittsburgh almost as soon as the car was opened, waiting on a dead track to be picked up by the St. Louis train. He was lying now stretched out, except that one leg dangled from the knee, on the long seat across the room. He was using one of the pillows Wilfred had left out.

But there was something sort of funny about that. He wasn't using the pillow under his head, the way pillows were meant to be used. He had the pillow on top of his head. That was mighty funny.

Wilfred was worried already, but he went on in. He touched the man's shoulder, gently and uneasily.

“We's there, suh,” he said, his accent broadening as it did when Wilfred was worried. “We's in New Yo'k, suh. We's—”

Wilfred stopped, because the man was not listening. And Wilfred stretched out one shaking dark hand and pushed against the pillow, so that it fell away from the man's head. Wilfred stared down at the suffused face.

“Man,” Wilfred said. “You is suah enough there. You is whe'evuh you is going.”

And then Wilfred pushed the pillow back convulsively over the face and started running. He also started yelling. At the door of the next car he found the Pullman conductor and, growing more excited as he thought about it—until it was hardly possible to understand what he was saying—tossed murder in the conductor's lap.

“It look to me like he was smothered,” Wilfred told the Pullman conductor, and led him back to Bedroom C. The conductor, who had been twenty-five years in Pullman service without encountering anything similar, pushed away the pillow. It looked to the Pullman conductor, also, as if the occupant of Bedroom C, Car 620, had been smothered. It looked as if somebody had put one of the convenient pillows over his face and pressed down hard, and kept on pressing.

It looked the same way to the railroad police, and to the precinct homicide men who answered their call. And the assistant medical examiner who responded, assured them that they were right. By that time, by the time a headquarters squad under Detective Lieutenant Fahey took over, Car 620, detached and ostracized, was on a siding in the Sunnyside yards.

It took only the briefest of observations to determine that the thin, gray-haired man in Bedroom C had been murdered. Someone had used one of the pillows Wilfred Tingle had left out for his passengers' comfort, and used it to smother the passenger. After photographs and fingerprinting, and formal assurance of death by an assistant medical examiner, it took hardly more time to make identification (tentative) of the murdered man as Robert J. Demming, resident of Pittsburgh. From then on, things went more slowly.

It became evident, almost at once, that an issue of jurisdiction was involved. Was Robert J. Demming alive when Bedroom C of Car 620, rolling through the Pennsylvania Railroad's tunnel under the Hudson, passed the judicially important line separating New Jersey from New York? Lieutenant Fahey did not know; the assistant medical examiner did not know. Mr. Demming had been dead only a short time when the shaking hand of Wilfred Tingle brushed the pillow from his face. But that time could not be measured in seconds.

But possession of the body seemed to be nine-tenths of the law, or at least enough of the law to go ahead on. New Jersey, Lieutenant Fahey rather unhappily supposed, would not contest; New Jersey would, almost certainly, be pleased to waive Mr. Demming to the State of New York, and let the State of New York worry. Lieutenant Fahey, representing the State of New York, began to worry.

Part of it was easy. Mr. Demming (tentative) had boarded Car 620 in Pittsburgh at about 10:30, when it was on a siding waiting for the express from St. Louis which was to pick it up. The express from St. Louis duly picked it up forty-five minutes later. Presumably Mr. Demming slept during the night, and certainly he was alive the next morning. He was one of the early awakeners, Wilfred Tingle could testify. The train had not yet reached Philadelphia when Mr. Demming, fully dressed, rang for Tingle and asked for a 110-volt converter so that he could use a standard electric shaver. Tingle had brought the converter. About fifteen minutes later, as the train was by-passing the Thirtieth Street station in Philadelphia, Mr. Demming had come out of his room and gone back to the diner. Half an hour later, after the train had stopped at North Philadelphia and was running on toward Trenton, Mr. Demming came back to Bedroom C. By that time, Tingle had bundled up used sheets from the lower berth, put the spare mattress back in the upper berth, removed dirty towels and left two pillows on the long seat for Mr. Demming's greater comfort.

Tingle had not seen Mr. Demming again until he found him dead. He had a vague, unreliable, belief that the door of Bedroom C had been closed by Mr. Demming after he had returned to the room. He was certain it had been closed as the train passed New Brunswick, when he began to attend to the passengers who wanted to get off at Newark for transfer to the Hudson & Manhattan lines, and downtown New York. He had knocked at the door then, to find out whether Mr. Demming was going through to the Pennsylvania Station, and had received no answer. He had assumed Mr. Demming was, and had gone on.

After Newark, he had attended to passengers leaving at New York, picking up their bags and piling them in the vestibule. And when he reached this point, Tingle remembered something and his eyes rolled.

“He'd done put his bag outside,” Tingle said. “Mostly the passengers leave them under the seat for me to haul out, but this gentleman had got it out and put it outside his door. I figured—”

Tingle, it turned out, assumed the gentleman did not wish to be disturbed, and so had not offered to brush his clothes. Tingle thought, it became apparent, that the gentleman was using the individual toilet facilities which were an advertised, and actual, feature of the new-style bedrooms. Tingle had therefore taken the bag and piled it with the others in the car vestibule. When the train stopped he had put it out on the platform. That was all Tingle knew.

Lieutenant Fahey said, “All right, boy,” and interviewed the Pullman conductor, who could add little. He had not seen Mr. Demming, whose tickets had been collected in the station at Pittsburgh. All Mr. Demming was to the conductor was a mark on a chart, showing single occupancy, Pittsburgh to New York, of Bedroom C, Car 620.

Between New York and Pittsburgh, the train had stopped at Altoona, Harrisburg, Paoli and at North Philadelphia. Thereafter it had stopped only at Newark. The Pullman conductor suggested that the person who murdered Mr. Demming had either ridden with him all the way from Pittsburgh or got on at one of the intermediate stations, ending with North Philadelphia.

“How about Newark?” Lieutenant Fahey wanted to know. The conductor shook his head decisively.

“We are not allowed to take on passengers at Newark,” he said. “Stop only to discharge.”

“Would you have seen anybody who tried to get on at Newark?” Fahey insisted.

“Somebody would,” the conductor insisted. “Nobody gets on there.”

He was positive about it. But it had to be checked. Fahey's men rounded up the crew of the train, from porters up, and questioned. Nobody had seen anybody get on the train at Newark. Each man questioned looked startled, and said that nobody was allowed to get on at Newark. It was against the rules.

“Somebody who was going to kill a guy might take a chance on a company rule,” Fahey suggested to the train conductor. The train conductor looked startled and a little shocked. This, his expression said, was a remark which made light of the company rules, of which light was not to be made. After that, he said flatly that it was impossible for anyone to get on at Newark without being seen.

It began to look to Lieutenant Fahey as if the weight of the investigation was going to fall on the authorities of neither New Jersey nor New York, but on those of Pennsylvania. New York was left holding the body; Pennsylvania presumably held the facts, and the background. Unless—unless, of course, somebody had gone to the trouble of going at least as far from New York as North Philadelphia in order to ride back on the same train with Mr. Demming and kill him. This seemed, to Lieutenant Fahey, to be going a long way around. In any event, Lieutenant Fahey decided, Pennsylvania was the place to start.

He left the boys at it and drove back to Headquarters. He got in touch with Pittsburgh and told Pittsburgh that its Mr. Robert J. Demming (tentative) was dead in New York of smothering, and it looked like their baby. He reported direct to Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley, Lieutenant Weigand, acting captain and Fahey's immediate superior, being elsewhere. O'Malley agreed it was Pittsburgh's baby, for the moment. He said, sadly, that it looked as if Lieutenant Fahey was going to have to make a trip to Pittsburgh, eventually. Lieutenant Fahey, who disapproved of travel, sighed and said there wasn't any hurry, was there? Pittsburgh had better look around first, hadn't it? O'Malley nodded absently and went on reading his mail.

Lieutenant Fahey had been gone several minutes when Inspector O'Malley sat up as straight as he could, considering his structure, and said he'd be damned. He snorted, glared around the room, and commanded his secretary.

“Get Weigand!” he commanded. “Get Fahey.”

Fahey was easy to get. He came back and looked at the letter and said he'd be damned. Lieutenant Weigand was not easy to get. Lieutenant Weigand had been in and had gone out. He had left telephone numbers at which he might be reached.

12

Saturday, 9:30
A
.
M
. to 12:10
P
.
M
.

Mrs. Paul Williams, seated behind her desk in her law offices in Forty-fourth Street, was more corseted than ever. She had sent word that she was engaged. Weigand had promised to take only a few minutes. She had, testily, agreed to allow him a very few. When Weigand sat across from her in an uncomfortable chair, dedicated to clients, she sat in her own chair as if Weigand were about to leave at any instant. She said, “Well, Lieutenant?”

Weigand wasted no time.

“You lunched at a place called the Roundabout yesterday,” he told her. “You met a man named Jung—Bandelman Jung—at the bar. He stole a telegram from you. What's it all about?”

The way to find things out was to ask, Weigand believed. If that failed, of course, you had to use other means.

“Jung?” Mrs. Williams repeated. “Oh, the funny little man. Is he one of your men, Lieutenant?”

“No,” Weigand said. “He's not one of us. What did he want?”

“He was ridiculous,” Mrs. Williams said. “He wanted to know if I killed Mr. Sproul.”

Weigand looked at her.

“Just like that?” he said.

“Just like that,” Mrs. Williams assured him. “He sat down beside me at the bar and said, ‘Mrs. Williams, please. Did you kill Mr. Sproul?'”

That was remarkable. Weigand said it was remarkable.

“It was preposterous,” Mrs. Williams corrected. “Such things shouldn't be allowed.” She stared at him. “Such things aren't allowed,” she said. “He could have been arrested.”

“Yes,” Weigand agreed. “Was that all he said? I take it you told him you didn't kill Mr. Sproul, by the way?”

Mrs. Williams looked at him hard and decided to skip it.

“No,” she said. “He kept insisting. Was I sure I hadn't killed Mr. Sproul? I ordered him to quit bothering me.”

“And—” Weigand prompted.

“He said that he was asking everybody,” she said. “Everybody who was there—at the club. He said they all denied it. He was entirely ridiculous; he was—plaintive about it. As if everybody was in a conspiracy against him.” She shook her head. “Obviously,” she said, “he should be committed for observation.”