Killing the Goose (33 page)

The letter was signed only with a capital “N.” It was a kind of proud and flaunting “N.” The letter was written in a characteristic hand—decisive, clear; very vigorous and very young.

“Well!” Pam said. “She didn't like Aunt Amelia? Who is she?”

Apparently, Bill said, she was Nora Gipson, Amelia Gipson's niece. There was a reference to her in one of the other letters; a letter about the trust fund. Which did not, at the moment, seem to have any bearing. However—He handed Pam a second letter. It was written in a sloping, nervous hand that quavered a little. It was written also by a woman; by, if you accepted the heading on the letter paper, Mrs. Willard Burt. It addressed itself to “Dear Amelia” and went on:

“You have made—somehow—a terrible mistake. You should know that what you think is impossible—if you really do think it. I keep feeling that I must have misunderstood you yesterday. It is the only thing I can think. That you could really imagine—dream—But I won't go on.

“Amelia, you used to know—in the old days—that you could trust me. Believe me, nothing has changed—I haven't changed. You can trust me now as you used to—trust me when I tell you that there is nothing—absolutely nothing—in what you say.

“Dear—I know this isn't very coherent. But we can't let things stay as they are. It isn't safe—for either of us. Won't you come and have lunch with me? On Thursday—here? I know if we can talk quietly I can make you understand how insanely wrong you are.”

The letter was signed: “As ever, Helen.”

Pam looked at the letter for a moment after she had finished it. Then, slowly, she read it again. Her face was puzzled.

“I don't understand it, do you?” she said. She might have been speaking to either of the men. “It's—pathetic. And somehow frightening. Or was she—this Helen—just sort of hysterical—about something not really as important as she thinks?”

Bill said he didn't know. He said it was one of the things they would have to find out. As they would have to find out about Nora. About the perfumed woman who substituted poison for medicinal powders. About the peculiar discrepancy between Amelia Gipson's apparently very comfortable financial situation and the forty-dollar-a-week job she had elected to take with North Books, Inc.

“About the job,” Pam said. “Could she have found out something? About one of the old murders? Something that made her dangerous, even now?”

Bill Weigand thought for a moment, and then emphasized the doubt on his face by shaking his head. He said he shouldn't think so.

“You don't,” he pointed out, “make some new discovery about an old crime by reading what newspaper and magazine writers—or even book writers, Jerry—say about it. Because the police always know more; much more. You know that. More even than the official records. It's in the minds of the men who have worked on the case—in their hunches—in what they've guessed from the look in somebody's eyes, in the tones of voices. Stuff that isn't written down. At best, people who write about old crimes have to rely on logic. And at best, logic isn't enough. Not in this business.”

Pam said she knew. She said there was no doubt he was right. She said it was only an interesting coincidence.

“Anyway,” Jerry pointed out, “the murders she was working on are, with one or two exceptions, solved murders. And the exceptions—as I remember them—go a good ways back. Somebody wanted to do the Hall-Mills case again, and I couldn't talk him out of it, although it's been done to death. But I shouldn't think Amelia would happen to stumble on a dangerous solution of that one. For one thing, almost everybody's dead.”

Bill Weigand broke it up. He said that, in any event, they were done there. For the moment. Tomorrow they would really do the apartment. Tomorrow they would—and he smiled at that—have the chambermaids smelled by an expert smeller. He stood up and the Norths went ahead of him out of the apartment. At the door, Weigand bent and examined the lock. He stood up and said that people were fools.

“She's had a special lock put on,” he said. “About half as good—as safe—as the one she had taken off, unless the builders skimped badly. I could open this one with a bent hairpin.”

“Really?” Pam said, and looked at the lock in turn.

“No,” Bill Weigand said. “Maybe not. But I could open it with a pick in a couple of minutes; an expert could do it in thirty seconds. And anybody, with a reasonable assortment of keys, would have a ten-to-one chance of simply walking in.”

They went down the hall, and down to the desk in the lobby. Weigand telephoned the precinct for a man to stand by outside Miss Gipson's apartment until the next day; he spoke briefly to the sleepy manager of the Holborn Annex. He arranged for the questioning, the next morning, of the maid who did the rooms on Miss Gipson's floor; he discovered that maid service was optional with the tenants, and that by no means all of them wanted it, and that as a result there were only three women—one of them young, the other two middle-aged—employed regularly by the Annex. The younger woman did Miss Gipson's room.

He spoke about the lock, and the manager awakening shrugged and lifted his hands. He knew the lock Miss Gipson had insisted on having installed was inferior to the standard locks on the other apartment doors in the building. He had told her so; the man who installed the lock had told her so. But she had insisted; she had thought they were trying to talk her out of their trouble and expense. She had said it was nonsense to expect her to trust to a lock like hundreds of others, all openable with a master key.

“How about the maid?” Weigand asked.

“Naturally,” the manager said, “she had to have a key. Even Miss Gipson admitted that. But the key had to be kept at the desk—the girl had to get it each time she did the room and return it after she had finished. Miss Gipson checked up periodically.”

“And the key was always to be accounted for?” Weigand asked.

The manager smiled faintly. He said there had been a couple of times; he said Miss Gipson wanted them to fire the maid. He pointed out that it would have been much easier to replace Miss Gipson; there was a suggestion that he had, tactfully, conveyed this fact of post-war housing to her. He wanted to know, in that connection, when the apartment would be available for a new tenant.

“We'll get enquiries tomorrow, you know,” he said. “When this hits the newspapers. If her address is given. People are”—he paused, picking words—“quite anxious for apartments.”

Weigand said it might be a week or so and the manager looked disappointed. He said that the whole thing was a great inconvenience.

Bill Weigand admitted that it probably was; he joined the Norths, waiting by the door, and interrupted their conversation with the doorman.

“He says she went out about six,” Pam told him. “He supposed to dinner.”

Bill said he supposed the same thing.

Pam wanted to know where now? The library, Bill told her, to see how things went there.

“Then?” Pam said.

Then, Bill Weigand thought, his office and home, until morning.

“Not my office?” Jerry said.

That would keep, Bill thought. It would keep until tomorrow.

“She might have notes there,” Pam said.

Bill agreed she might. He said the notes would keep. He asked if they wanted a lift home in the police car. Jerry North was ready to say yes, but he found that Pam was shaking her head at him.

“We'll walk,” Pam said. “It's only a few blocks. Won't we, Jerry? And such a nice night.”

Jerry agreed they would walk.

Gerald North paid off the taxi driver and looked without pleasure at the elderly office building on Fourth Avenue in the low Thirties. He looked at his watch and said that, of course, it was almost two o'clock.

“In the morning,” he added.

“It won't,” Pam told him, “take a minute. We'll just get her notes before somebody else does and see if there's anything else. That somebody might want. I think Bill should have, but after all it's your office.”

After all, Jerry said, he had spent the day in it. He would spend tomorrow in it.

“Today,” he said, morosely. “Beginning in seven hours.”

But they had crossed the sidewalk to the building entrance and opened the door. It was a building in which publishers nested, gregariously. It was a building to which some of them, sometimes, came late at night, usually to get things they had forgotten. So, although the building belonged to an era when doors were locked at night, its door was not locked. An elderly man slept uneasily on guard by the two elevators. Jerry signed the night register and looked at the guard.

“Poor thing,” Pam said. “We could walk.”

Sympathy, Jerry told her, began at home. They could ride. The guard awoke unwillingly and looked at the Norths without enthusiasm. He said, “God,” with the resignation of one who has ceased to expect an answer. He looked at the stairway which ran up beside the elevators and his look was reproachful. He got up and went to the elevator and into it without saying anything, and waited. When the Norths got in he took them up. He stopped at the fifth floor and they got out. He followed them for a step or two, and when they looked at him he looked fixedly at the staircase. Then he got into the elevator and disappeared with it.

“We'll walk down,” Pam said. “The poor man.”

Jerry said nothing but went along the hall until he came to a door at the end marked “North Books, Inc.” He opened the door with his key and stopped and looked at his key.

“Listen,” he said. “Where was her key? Miss Gipson's? To this door; to her own door at home. To whatever else she had a right to open? Were they in her bag?”

Pam shook her head. She said the police had probably taken them out.

“Bill got the maid's key from the manager,” Jerry told her. “To the apartment. He didn't have it.”

Pam said it was odd, without seeming to think it odd, and why didn't they go in? They went in. Jerry switched on the lights in the reception-room, comfortable in modern furniture. It was a wide, shallow room, with doors at either end and near the ends in the wall opposite the entrance door. Jerry went to the door in the opposite wall at the right end and threw another tumbler switch, lighting the offices. He went down an inner corridor, with a railing on one side and beyond it desks with typewriters hibernating in them. He switched on more lights in a small office at the end of the corridor. He waved at it and sat down in a chair.

“Miss Gipson's,” he said. “Her copies of her notes are in the lower right-hand drawer of the desk. Each copy is clipped to the notebook in which she made her original notes. She used one notebook for each case. My copies are in my office. The originals have been sent to the authors who are going to use them.” He sighed and appeared to go to sleep. He roused himself. “It's all yours,” he said. “Wake me up when we get home.”

Pam North looked in the lower right-hand drawer of the desk. Then she looked at Jerry.

“I'm sorry, Jerry,” she said, “but you did say ‘right?' Because they aren't, you know.”

“They were,” he said. “I suppose she moved them. Look, darling.”

Pam looked. Then she looked at Jerry.

“Listen, Jerry,” she said. “Are you sure this is the right office? Because there's nothing in the desk. Nothing at all.” She paused. “Except some old paper clips and things, of course,” she said. “No notes. No letters.”

“I tell you—” Jerry said, and suddenly sat up. He went to the desk and pulled out the drawers one after another and shut them again. He looked at Pam. He was no longer sleepy.

“We were late,” Pam said. “In spite of everything, we were late.”

Jerry nodded. He said there had evidently been something in Miss Gipson's desk that somebody wanted.

“Her murderer,” Pam said.

“You jump, Pam,” Jerry said. “But probably her murderer.”

“You wouldn't like me if I didn't jump,” Pam said. “We both know that. And it's foolish to call it a jump. He wanted her notes on the famous crimes.”

Jerry shook his head at that. He pointed out that that really was a jump. He said it might have been anything—anything that collects in an office desk, even in a month. Letters received at the office, or carried to the office for rereading and left in the desk. Little memoranda, scrawled on slips of paper. Or written on desk calendars.

They had both thought of that at the same moment. Their heads met over the desk. The desk calendar was there. The uppermost sheet said Tuesday, September 11. But the old sheets—the turned-back sheets—were missing. Two-thirds of the year had vanished. And the past month of Amelia Gipson's life.

“Well,” Pam said.

She watched as Jerry leafed into the future, which was not to be Miss Gipson's future. In early October there was one notation: “Dentist, 2
P
.
M
.” That was to have been on October 9. Beyond that, in so far as she had confided to her desk calendar, Miss Gipson had had no plans.

“Perhaps she tore the old ones off and threw them away after they were finished,” Pam said. “The old days.”

“Perhaps,” Jerry said. “But I never knew anyone who did, did you? From this kind of a calendar, with rings meant to—to hold the past? For reference? Because that's one thing calendars on office desks are for. Day before yesterday's telephone numbers—things like that.”

Pam was nodding slowly.

“What happened,” she said, “was that everything was taken. Whether it meant anything or not. So we wouldn't know what
did
mean something. Don't you suppose it was that way?”

Jerry agreed it could have been. He was looking thoughtfully at nothing. Then he said, “Wait here a minute, Pam,” and went out of the office, and she could hear his steps going down the corridor. She stopped hearing them and waited in an office which had grown very still. She waited until surely it was time for him to come back. And then the lights in the general office went out. Pam was on her feet and crying, “Jerry! Jerry!” with her voice rising and then she was running through the office, dim and shadowy with only the light from the office behind her to dispel the darkness. As she ran toward Jerry's office she saw that there was no light in it.