Death Takes a Bow (32 page)

The entrance hall was wider than he would have expected. Off it, on the left, was a small room which was, he decided, dedicated to the Capehart which seemed almost to fill it. Ahead, the entrance hall ended in a large room which occupied what remained of the first floor of the house. It was a comfortable room and there was a man in it, sitting in a chair and staring at the carpet. A third uniformed man stood beside him, watching him and not saying anything. Weigand's eyebrows went up slightly.

At his left, just inside the big room, Weigand found a stairway, curving delicately upward. He curved up with it, as delicately as seemed appropriate. It conducted him into a hall between two rooms and then he followed his ears. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley was in the larger of the rooms, which fronted on the street. He was supported, and attended, by several men. One was, Bill Weigand recognized, the precinct homicide man and another was a sergeant on his staff. There were two more men from the headquarters squad and Detective Stein was on the floor, measuring something with the folding rule. The distance from somewhere to the chalked outline which was, roughly, the outline of a human body. Not a large body, evidently. Stein was marking the spot.

“Well, Lieutenant, where the hell have you been?” O'Malley said. O'Malley was large in all dimensions and red-faced and emphatic. “Not,” he added, “that it matters a damn. All cleaned up.”

“Good,” Bill said. “Congratulations, Inspector.”

O'Malley looked at him and there was a momentary doubt in the inspector's unmelting blue eyes. He saw nothing in Weigand's face to support suspicion.

“Open and shut,” Inspector O'Malley said, driving it home. “None of this fooling around. None of this fancy stuff. Routine, Lieutenant.”

Weigand, involuntarily, said “Oh.” Inspector O'Malley said “Huh?” with great emphasis.

“Nothing,” Weigand said. “It was good work, Inspector.”

“Nothing to it,” the inspector said, his tone indicating that there had been, particularly, nothing to it for him. What Weigand would have done with it, the tone indicated, was another matter. “A set-up. Guy who was going to marry her did it. They had a quarrel and—slosh! Hit her with a poker. Brass poker, stuck in one of those gadgets.”

He pointed at the gadget, a rack for fireplace tools. There was a shovel in it and a bellows dangling from a hook and what was, evidently, intended to be a hearth brush. There was no poker. That would be because the lab boys had it, checking the prints; setting them for photographs. There was no body, either. Dr. Francis, assistant medical examiner—or another—would have that.

“Well,” Weigand said, “in that case, I'd better get back on the Greystone killing. There's a funny sort of thing about—”

Inspector O'Malley, interrupting, told Weigand not to be a fool. He'd fooled around enough with that already.

“Twice as long as you needed to,” he said. “I got the reports. The kid did it. This—this—”

“Martinelli,” Bill told him. “Franklin. But—”

O'Malley said there were no buts about it. It was as simple as this one. “This one right here,” he specified. It was, further, small-time stuff. This wasn't.

“Decided I'd better handle this myself,” O'Malley said. “Considering who she was, and everything. Thought it might be complicated. Screwy. Some of these—But as soon as I looked around and listened to the old gal downstairs I saw it was a set-up.”

“Does he admit it?” Bill asked. “The man who was going to marry her. Whoever he is. The guy downstairs, I suppose.”

O'Malley said, yeh, the guy downstairs. And no, he didn't admit it. “Yet.” He would, though.

“I'll leave that to you,” O'Malley said. “Nothing you can't handle, with the boys. He'll spill it, soon enough. I've got him softened up for you.” He looked at Weigand and was pleased. “Shows you how to do it, don't it, Bill?” he said. “Couple of hours and it's cleaned up. None of this fancy stuff. When I think of the way you young fellows—”

Bill Weigand, resigned, listened to the way of young fellows, as contrasted with the superior way of experienced policemen, here represented by Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley. It was not unfamiliar. He nodded at intervals, said “Right,” once or twice, watched Stein measuring. He did not look at the faces of the other detectives from the precinct, and particularly not at Detective Lieutenant Armstrong, of the precinct. He suspected that Armstrong would be grinning; he suspected that, if he saw it, his own face might reflect the grin.

“So,” O'Malley finished, “there it is, Bill. In your lap.” He looked at his watch and seemed surprised by it. “Got to be getting along,” he said. “Can't spend the night here. Nothing you boys can't do now.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “If we need you, Inspector—?”

“You won't,” O'Malley promised, and Bill Weigand thought it probable. “Got to see a man at the club.”

“Right,” Weigand said again. “At the club.”

“Business,” O'Malley said, severely, and for a third time Weigand said “right.” Without inflection.

Inspector O'Malley went out; Lieutenant Armstrong and Bill Weigand considered his progress down the stairs, which creaked with it.

“Our only Artie,” Armstrong said, with tenderness not to be taken at its face value. “Our only Artie. The miracle man.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Our only Artie. And so he's cleaned it up?”

Lieutenant Armstrong of the precinct said it looked as if he had, at that. Except for a few details, like maybe a confession. Or some evidence. That part, Armstrong said, belonged to Bill Weigand. At the thought of what was left to Bill Weigand, Lieutenant Armstrong did not seem displeased. Weigand waited, and Armstrong said it was this way—

The body was found where the chalked outline near the fireplace showed. It was found at a little before four o'clock in the afternoon by the housekeeper, Mrs. Florence Pennock. It was clothed—

“Do you,” Weigand said, “have to call it it?”

Armstrong was willing to start over. “It” was Miss Ann Lawrence, twenty-three, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Lawrence, both of whom had been dead for several years. And both of whom had had money since man could remember. Money that the girl had had until—well, until twelve hours, perhaps, before her body was found. Hence the house, hence large property possessions and many stocks and bonds; hence the Social Register and membership on junior committees. A very lovely, lucky lady, she must have been.

“Not too lucky,” Weigand said.

Armstrong shrugged. Obviously, in the end, not too lucky. In the end her luck had run out. Some time the previous morning. When a heavy poker hit the back of her head and crushed it, so that blood and brains ran out and soaked into the gay rose carpet of her sitting room, or whatever she had called it. This room.

Mrs. Pennock had found the body of the girl and had screamed and then had crossed the room and tried to awaken the girl. Because she looked, from a little distance, as if she were sleeping, lying on the floor on her back. She did not look that way when you got nearer; she was still lying that way when the police came, and the horrible wound in the back of her head was not easily visible as she lay. From the door she looked like a very lovely girl lying on her back and looking intently at the ceiling out of widely spaced brown eyes, with rather long, gently curling hair strewn out around her face.

“And matted together with blood and stuff,” Armstrong said.

She had been, Armstrong added, quite a looker. She had been wearing an evening dress when she was killed; a two-tone dress with the bodice of light yellow silk and a broad sash and a swirling skirt of dark blue. The clothing was not disarranged particularly, except that on one side the bodice, cut in a deep, narrow V in front, had fallen aside so as to leave a shoulder bare. The body was quite stiff and cold when they found it; there had been a fire, but it had burned itself out hours before. As she lay, her head was near the fireplace, but there was some evidence that she had not first fallen where she was found, or in that position. She had fallen forward, or started to, been caught and lowered to the floor and left there on her back. The reason for this was not clear, unless the person who struck her had not realized the force of his blow immediately, or what it had done, and had perhaps had a moment's remorse and a moment, which must certainly have been very short, of thinking he might undo what he had done. If he had had any such idea, it could not have lasted long; one look at the wound would have made that clear to anyone.

“The poker had a crook, you know,” Armstrong said. “The kind of dull-pointed hook most pokers have. Well—that went in first. Half way through her head. It was—” he stopped a moment. “Sort of messy,” he said.

Weigand nodded.

That was what they had to start with. A girl in evening clothes, lying on a gay rose carpet with her head bashed in. When the medical examiner arrived, and by the time the body was removed—and Inspector O'Malley was in charge—they had an approximate time of death. Somewhere between two and four o'clock that morning. About an hour after the end of the party.

“Party?” Weigand encouraged.

Ann Lawrence had given a party the evening before. She had had some people in for dinner and others after dinner and things had been gay. Or so Mrs. Pennock, the housekeeper, said. So far as they had discovered, it had not been a party celebrating any particular occasion—just a party, eight at dinner, four or five after dinner; drinks and conversation and some dancing, but mostly drinks and conversation. The guests had left, or the last of them had left, about two. Ann had gone up to bed, presumably.

“The back room,” Armstrong said, gesturing at it, was where she slept. “This room was just a room to live in, sort of. And sometimes a guest room.”

The preceding evening it had been a place for the women to leave their wraps and to fix their hair. The men had put their things in the room near the door; the room with the big Capehart. There had been no overnight guest; Ann Lawrence had had the second floor to herself. After she had gone to it, Mrs. Pennock, who lived in the house, had gone to her own room, which was on the floor above. The maid who had been serving had gone home about the middle of the evening; Ann's personal maid had gone after she had helped Ann dress. So in the house after the party there had been only Ann herself, and Mrs. Pennock—and someone else.

“The guy downstairs, if Artie's right,” Armstrong said. “And I guess he's right. Name of Elliot—John Elliot. A writer or something.”

Mrs. Pennock had told them that—that and enough more, it looked like, to send John Elliot to the electric chair.

Ann had been in her bedroom, with the door closed, when the housekeeper passed the second floor on her way to her own room. The front room had been dark. Ann was still up, and the housekeeper heard her moving about.

“And singing,” Armstrong added. “Not knowing yet what had happened to her luck.”

Mrs. Pennock had gone on upstairs, undressed and gone into the bathroom. And by that time, Ann was not alone. Elliot was with her, and to that the housekeeper would swear willingly—eagerly. “She's pretty sore about the whole thing,” Armstrong said. “On account of liking the girl, and maybe being out of a job. And not much liking this guy Elliot. The girl was going to marry him, see?”

“Elliot?” Weigand said. “They were engaged?”

Armstrong pointed out, with reason, that that was what he had just said. John Elliot and Ann Lawrence were going to get married. Or had been going to get married.

“Right,” Weigand said.

If he was sure that was clear, Armstrong said, he would get on with it. There was a ventilator in Mrs. Pennock's bathroom, on a shaft which also served the larger bathroom below—the bathroom which connected, with its adjoining dressing room, the two rooms used by Ann on the second floor. Even when the doors of the second floor bathroom were closed, you could hear a good deal of what went on on the second floor. With them, or one of them, open you could hear just about everything. One of them—the one leading, by way of the dressing room, into the front sitting room, apparently had been open the night before, since Mrs. Pennock had heard plenty.

Elliot must have come up the stairs almost immediately behind her, Mrs. Pennock thought, although there had been ten or fifteen minutes between the time she reached her own floor and the time she went into the bathroom. He had been there long enough, anyway, to have got well into a conversation with Ann. And they were quarreling.

Armstrong thought Weigand would want to talk to Mrs. Pennock himself, probably, but this was the gist. The girl was refusing to do something that Elliot wanted her to do. He was insisting, with growing excitement. She kept saying “No,” and “No, John, I won't have it that way,” and finally they had both got excited. Mrs. Pennock could not tell what they were arguing about, although she evidently listened carefully, but she did hear enough to decide that it was no ordinary argument—that it was emotional and violent. Particularly on Elliot's part.

The quarrel had gone on for several minutes, getting more and more violent until; Mrs. Pennock said, Elliot was shouting and the girl's voice was raised. And she heard sounds which made her think that at least one of the two was moving around violently. Elliot, she thought; it sounded as if he were striding back and forth and pushing things which got in his way. And then he had shouted some words of which she wasn't sure and after that, in a very loud voice—

“It's a showdown, then! You can't make—”

And then some more she wasn't sure of. Because then, she thought, one of them had closed the door leading into the dressing room; probably Ann herself, since she knew how voices carried up the airshaft. But even after the door was closed she heard voices, still raised and growing, she thought, angrier. And then one more phrase clearly. It was Ann speaking this time, and apparently near the door—perhaps with her back to it. She said—