Death Takes a Bow (24 page)

And that, Weigand thought immediately, would have done them no particular good, because Mr. Demming would have been dead by the time they had met him. Unless they had gone to North Philadelphia, where they would not have gone. Or—wait a moment—to Newark. They would not have gone there either. But—

“Yeh,” Lieutenant Fahey said, as Weigand looked up at him. “A hell of a note, ain't it?”

Weigand agreed. He asked Fahey a question. Fahey shrugged.

“That's what they say,” he told Weigand. “They're pretty positive. Whoever killed him must have ridden with him from at least North Philadelphia. Sure the train stops at Newark. And sure nobody could have got on there. That's what they say.”

He shrugged slightly.

Weigand tossed him a sheaf of reports and shrugged in turn. Fahey leafed through them and said it was sure a hell of a note.

The reports were from watching men who had had eyes on certain people until six o'clock that morning, when their tours of duty ended. They had not been replaced, because Inspector O'Malley had decided it wasn't necessary; because, Weigand admitted honestly, he had himself been fairly sure it wasn't necessary, and had made no argument. The reports showed that at six o'clock that morning, barring devious exits from their apartments and furnished rooms, and homes in Westchester, the people being watched had been under observation in New York City. They had not been in North Philadelphia. At 6:40 the train on which Robert J. Demming was riding, bringing information to the police, left North Philadelphia for New York. At that time Mr. Demming was alive.

If the murderer of Mr. Demming got on the train at North Philadelphia, he was not George Schwartz, at home in his hotel in the Forties, or Loretta Shaw, at home in Murray Hill; it was not either of the Akrons, nor Mr. White nor Y. Charles Burden. It was not Mrs. Paul Williams nor, on the basis of another report, this time from an F.B.I. man, the little dark Mr. Jung. It was, in short, not anybody who had so far entered the sprawling, unsatisfactory picture of the Sproul investigation. And if that was true, Weigand had so far got precisely nowhere, which was discouraging.

But if it were Newark, now—there had been time enough to get to Newark by tube train and to meet the train which was bringing Mr. Demming. A murderer would have had to move briskly, but murderers must expect to make some sacrifices.

Weigand called Mullins and gave Mullins instructions. Mullins looked grieved and said, “Newark?” in a certain tone. When Weigand nodded, Mullins said, “O.K., Loot, but how about using a department car?”

“So long as it isn't connected with you, O.K.,” Weigand said. “But remember, you're not a cop. You don't show any badge. Remember, you may have to testify, eventually.”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “If you can get it in. Which you can't.”

That, Weigand told him, they would let the D.A.'s office worry about. When and if. The D.A.'s office could tell it to the judge. At the least, they would have the information.

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. Mullins departed.

Mullins consulted time-tables and ordered a car from the police garage. He drove discreetly through the Holland Tunnel and followed signs to the Pulaski Skyway. He followed a sign which said “Newark Business District” and dropped down an incline from the elevated highway into the turmoil of New Jersey traffic. In Newark he had time to find a parking lot and deposit the car, and afterward to walk a block to the Pennsylvania Station. Mullins bought a Hudson and Manhattan ticket to New York and noted the cost down in the notebook which was sacred to the expense account.

Mullins climbed stairs to the platform. A multiple-unit train waited, with doors open and a few passengers sitting disconsolately inside, to the right of the platform as he faced in what was, he decided, the direction of New York. Mullins sauntered along the platform, lighting a cigarette; looking, he trusted, like a passenger stretching his legs until the last minute. He paused by the open door of one of the cars and gazed in abstractedly. (And a small, furtive man, who knew the build of the Mullinses through long, and rather unsatisfactory, experience, arose with an air of great preoccupation, kept his face averted, and sauntered back through two cars. Reaching the third, he sauntered out, stood for a moment abstractedly on the platform and, being sure Mullins was looking the other way, darted down a flight of exit stairs. The small furtive man didn't know whether they were after him again, but usually they were. Mullins, pleasantly assuring himself that nobody would take him for a policeman, continued his ambling patrol of the platform.)

Red caps appeared on the platform and began to look up the line. The head end of an electric locomotive appeared, and pulled a string of cars slowly along the platform, on the left as Mullins faced New York. Doors began to open and porters in white coats peered out. Red caps ran with the train along the platform, having picked their doors. The train stopped and porters began shoveling bags to the platform. Mullins loitered near one of the doors, well back in the train and in the Pullman section.

There was only a little luggage to come out of the car he had picked, and red caps clustered around it hopefully. Several people came out, pointed at bags and went off with porters following them. At the doors of the Hudson and Manhattan cars, trainmen began to call, “This train for downtown New York. This train for downtown New York.” Mullins moved up half the length of a car, toward the locomotive, and then walked down briskly toward a door. He reached it just as the porter was stepping back inside. Without hesitation, Mullins followed the porter inside. The porter looked at him.

“So this is Newark, huh?” Mullins said, with heartiness. “Doesn't look like much, George.”

“No, suh,” the porter said, continuing to look at him. Mullins remained bland.

“You don't stop long,” Mullins said. “Didn't have time to get back to my own car.”

The porter looked at him and quit looking at him.

“No, suh,” he said. “Jes' for people to get off. You goin' to the Pennsylvania Station, suh?”

“That's right,” Mullins said. He walked past the Negro, now moving rapidly. He moved forward in the car and was half way along it when the train started. He reached the door ahead and found a porter closing it.

“Hold it, boy,” Mullins said. “I want to get off!”

The porter shook his head and said, “Sorry, suh.”

“Can't open it now,” the porter said. “We's started, boss. Guess you'll jes' have to go on to New York, boss.”

Mullins guessed so too. He remembered the police car parked in Newark, realized he would have to go back to Newark and get it, and said, “Damn.”

“Yes,
suh
!” the porter said. Mullins, thinking with exasperation about the return trip to Newark, went to the men's lounge at the end of the car and sat down and lighted a cigarette. Anyhow, it had worked. He wouldn't, he decided, have to tell the Loot about getting caught on the train and having to go back to Newark for the car. It had worked without too much difficulty, but probably with the maximum difficulty to be expected. With more luck, he might have avoided conversation with the first porter, who might be expected to remember him. But he did not see how, without hopeless bungling, he could have had worse luck, and he was on the train.

So anybody could have boarded Car 620 in Newark by going to the trouble of pretending that he was a passenger on the train, and got off when the train stopped to stretch his legs, and had boarded it again before it left, entering through any car and pretending that his assigned accommodations were on another car. Anybody could then go to Bedroom C, assuming he knew Mr. Demming to be in Bedroom C, walk in, smother Mr. Demming, walk into the lounge—either lounge, depending on sex—or walk through to another car, get off at New York and go about his business.

But how would you know the room in which your victim was waiting? Mullins puzzled over that. Then he remembered that, while he stood on the platform, the Pullmans had crept by slowly, and that he had had time to look in the windows. If he were looking for someone, and watched carefully, and took his position far enough back along the platform so that most, at least, of the Pullmans would pass him before the train stopped, he would have a fair chance of spotting his man. But only, Mullins thought, a fifty-fifty chance, since the person you wanted might be sitting on the opposite side of the car.

Mullins shook his head at that. A fifty-fifty chance wasn't, he thought, as good a chance as a murderer would want to have. That wasn't good enough. Mullins, utilizing the fifteen minutes from Newark to New York with furious intensity, tried to think what was good enough. His mind stuck. He tossed the cigarette into an ash receiver as the train began to come up out of the tunnel and walked forward through the next car. Then it came to him.

The next car, unlike the one through which he had passed previously, was a room car and the corridor ran down one side. All the passengers, therefore, were on the other side and, if the windows went by slowly enough, you could look into their rooms. And Mr. Demming had been killed in such a car; it was only possible to kill him, as he had been killed, in such a car. So—

At the Pennsylvania Station, Mullins left the train, unchallenged. He pursued a new thought to the information booth in the center of the station, and got a folder of Pennsylvania trains. He followed hieroglyphics to trains between New York and Pittsburgh, east-bound, found the 11:15 and, in another column, found the paragraph concerning its “Equipment.” He read:

Pittsburgh to New York:

Fourteen sections, one drawing room

Ten double bedrooms.

He also found a note:

“Cars ready for occupancy, 10:30 P.M.”

Mullins, leaning against a convenient section of the wall, continued his researches gladly, if a little laboriously. He discovered that, as nearly as he could tell, the train on which Mr. Demming had arrived, dead, had come through from St. Louis, although Mr. Demming had not. Mr. Demming had got on a made-up car in Pittsburgh—one of two cars ready for occupancy at 10:30 P.M.—gone to sleep, been picked up in his car by the train from St. Louis and ridden on to death. So the person who wanted to spot Mr. Demming, and was willing to go to a little trouble, would have only to look in the windows of two cars. If he knew Mr. Demming well enough to know his habits, he probably would be able to decide whether to seek him in the room car, or in the open-section car. And if he wanted to go to still more trouble, he probably could find out, by asking, where in the train the two cars picked up at Pittsburgh would be. Probably, Mullins thought, at the end of the train.

Mullins, impressed with his rapid progress, found the station-master's office, identified himself, and asked questions. It would be possible for a person with a plausible story—the desire to meet an invalid relative, for example—to find out through the information service in New York where the cars from Pittsburgh would be in the train from St. Louis. It probably, a clerk told Mullins, would be possible to find out whether anyone had sought that information by interviewing the men on the telephone information service.

Mullins thought of pressing his quest, thought better of it, decided the car would be safe for a while longer in Newark, and went down to Headquarters by subway. He felt that the Loot would be pleased with him.

Weigand had watched Mullins set out for Newark and, for the first time he could remember, felt a little envious of the sergeant. Mullins was, at any rate, up and about things. He, Weigand, had only to sit, and look at papers, and think. He found the prospect uninviting. Now, he decided, would be a fine time for a hunch. He made himself receptive to hunches and waited. No hunch came. He lighted a cigarette, drummed his desk with tired fingers, and decided that logic would have to serve. He looked for a crevice in the case through which logic might creep. He saw none.

He went back to reports, checking the dossiers of those involved. He read again that Schwartz was not really wanted by the police in Cincinnati; he noted once more that Sproul had lived, and presumably flourished, during his youth in Iowa. He noted that Mrs. Paul Williams had been born in a Boston suburb and was a widow with two children; he observed that Burden lived in Westchester and had offices on Madison Avenue and was highly thought of in the lecture business—was generally, indeed, considered the man at the top of the heap; he saw that—

Then he stopped and turned back to the report on Burden, and a statement that his eyes had slid over first now caught and held them. Mr. Y. Charles Burden had, some weeks earlier, insured the life of Victor Leeds Sproul for $50,000, showing his contract with Sproul to prove an insurable interest.

The detective investigating—Stein, Weigand noted; good man, Stein—had continued his inquiry further on this point, had dug up the agent who had written the policy, and had made a separate report on the facts elicited. Weigand looked up the second report.

Burden had applied for the insurance on Sproul three months previously, a few days after he and Sproul had signed their contract. He had submitted that he had made at that date considerable expenditure preparing for the tour, and was preparing to make further expenditure; he had submitted that $50,000 would be only adequate recompense, in the event of Sproul's unanticipated death, for moneys already expended and to be expended, profits presumably to be derived and loss of prestige and confidence involved should Sproul be unable to complete the tour. The insurance agent had doubted whether it would go through and had suggested certain changes in the Sproul-Burden contract.

These had been made. The revised contract set up a partnership, limited in scope to the tour in question, between Sproul and Burden. Under this contract, reciprocal policies had become possible and had, in fact, been written. But, in view of the permanence of Burden's organization, and the evident fact that it would continue, even after his death, to direct the tour on which Sproul would then have embarked, the insurance taken by Sproul on Burden had been in the comparatively nominal sum of $5,000.