Killing the Goose (7 page)

Inspector O'Malley listened and exploded into the telephone. Bill Weigand listened to a description of himself which gave him several new ideas. Bill hung up and sighed and turned impatiently to a patrolman who was beginning to make sounds at his elbow.

“Well?” Bill Weigand said. “Well?”

“Some people,” the patrolman said. “Your wife and some people, Lieutenant. A Mr. and Mrs.—”

“Yes,” Weigand said. “I thought—” He broke off. “Ask my wife and the Norths to come in here, Smith,” he said. He waited in the living room, looking with continued disfavor at Patrolman McKenna, who was lying on a couch and holding his head and now and then sighing heavily. “Shut up,” Weigand said. “Did baby bump its little head?”

“What?” said Pam North from the door. “What baby? Whose head? And what's happened to you, Bill?”

Bill looked at the three and started to speak and gave it up.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just that the boys let a murderer walk out on them. Let him walk right through him. It seems to have annoyed the inspector.”

Pam said “oh” and added that it was too bad. Dorian said, “Bill! I'm sorry, dear.”

Bill Weigand smiled at them, not broadly.

“Oh,” he said, “we'll pick him up. In time. And I'll soothe the inspector down. In time. Don't worry, children.”

“Well, then,” Pam said, “if it's really all right, we can tell you. She's wearing her clothes.”

Weigand looked at them.

“Please,” Bill Weigand said. “Please, Pam.”

“Frances,” Pam said. “The girl in the cafeteria.
This
girl's clothes. So it's really one case, after all.”

Bill continued to look at them. He looked at them anxiously.

“That's right, Bill,” Dorian said. “The girl who was killed in the restaurant. Frances somebody. She was wearing a dress which had been cleaned for the girl who was killed here. Ann something.”

“McCalley,” Jerry North said. “Lawrence.”

“So,” Pam said, “obviously one man killed them both. So it couldn't have been the girl's boy and we have to start all over. So it was right about the apple.”

Weigand got it straightened out in a moment, and his interest rose as it straightened. But then he shook his head at Pam. He told her that she was jumping again. He said, as Jerry had, that the dress might have come from a thrift shop, and that it might be coincidence. Pam merely stared at him.

“All right,” he said. “I don't like that either. Which doesn't prove it isn't true. Or the Martinelli boy may have killed them both, for some reason. Or the guy who got away from here may have killed them both. Or Martinelli may have killed the McCalley girl and Elliot may have killed Miss Lawrence. Or—”

“Or a couple of other fellows,” Pam told him. “You don't believe any of it, Bill.”

But Bill Weigand would not admit that. He shook his head. It might be anyway. A person they didn't know yet might have killed both girls; two people they didn't know yet might each have killed a girl.

Weigand looked beyond the Norths and Dorian, and Sergeant Mullins was standing in the doorway. He looked very unhappy. When he saw that Weigand was looking at him, Mullins shook his head dolefully and formed a word with his mouth. Mullins gave the whole affair a vote of no confidence.

“Yes, Mullins?” Bill Weigand said. “Oh, you came with the others? Right.”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “So he got away, Loot? This guy who did it? Only now I guess he didn't.”

“Why, Mullins?” Weigand wanted to know.

Mullins told him. It would be too simple. It would be like the way cases used to be.

“Before—” Mullins said, rather darkly, looking at Mr. and Mrs. North. “In the good old days, sort of.”

Weigand told Mullins that the inspector didn't think it was too easy; that the inspector thought Elliot did it. The inspector had been touched and pleased when Elliot walked in.

“Walked in?” Pam North repeated.

Bill told her what Stein had told him, filling in details. Elliot had walked in after the body of Ann Lawrence had been found, and after police in the first radio patrol car had arrived. He had walked in, he said, to take Ann to a cocktail party, in accordance with an arrangement. He had been surprised and shocked. He had also been held.

“But doesn't that prove—?” Pam said. “No, of course it doesn't. Because if he was, he would have because it looked so innocent, wouldn't he?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “That's why it didn't impress the inspector.”

Then Bill Weigand was a little surprised at himself, because he had not been at all puzzled by what Pam North had said, and this was against nature. Evidently somebody's nature was changing. He let Pam's words echo faintly in his mind. It was his nature that was changing, all right. It was a little alarming to think that, because if it went on there might come a time when he could speak only to Pam North with any assurance of being understood. A closed corporation, like God and the Cabots. Or God and the Lowells? But Jerry North, whose nature had had a far longer time to adjust itself had ended in no such predicament. And he would always have Dorian—he hoped—as a counterbalance.

“But if he wasn't, he still Would, assuming they did have,” Dorian said.

Bill Weigand and Jerry North looked at each other.

“I don't know,” Jerry said, gently and as if from far away. “I don't know, Bill. Is it something in all of them, do you suppose? Or just these?”

“Dorian!” Bill said firmly, chidingly. “Darling!”

“Well,” Dorian said, “what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the goose. Or ought to be. What I meant, of course, was—”

“I know what you meant,” Bill told her. “You meant that if they had had an engagement and if he was not the murderer, and didn't know of the murder, he would naturally come around at the time agreed upon to pick her up.”

“Obviously,” Dorian agreed. “Only people don't talk that way.”

“Particularly here,” Jerry said.

Pam said she thought they were all talking nonsense.

“Where did he go?” Pam said. “How did he do it?”

Bill Weigand knew by now, and told her what he knew. John Elliot had knocked out his guardian policeman, gone out the rear, carried a box past the policeman in front, entered Gramercy Park by using the key which belonged to the Lawrence house, and pretended to be walking a dog.

“Why,” Pam said, “didn't the cop see the dog? The dog that wasn't there, I mean.”

“Snow,” Weigand told her. “And he thought it was behind a bush. If he thought.”

Pam pointed out that Elliot wanted to get away very much, which was odd if he were innocent.

“Unless,” she said, “he knew some way to prove he was innocent, but had to get away to do it. Which is possible.”

“Listen,” Mullins said. “I don't get this.” He looked at alt of them. “
Any
of it,” he said, with finality.

Mullins brought Weigand back to immediate problems. One of them, which was to question Elliot, could not now be met. Another could. For that he could use helpers, and now he had them. He picked Dorian and Jerry and told them what to do; he took Pam with him to the third floor, where Mrs. Pennock dwelt alone, and to the bathroom from which she had heard the quarrel in Ann Lawrence's sitting room. Pam sat down on the edge of the bed and Weigand closed the door and leaned against it. They listened to the ventilator. For a moment nothing came from it. Then Dorian's voice came, with remarkable clearness.

“Personally,” she said, “I think it's a trick. To get up there alone. Don't you—
darling!
”

“Obviously,” Jerry said, his voice also startlingly clear. “Our lawyers shall hear—Dorian!”

The last was in a voice which was filled with an emotion which for a moment struck Pam, who had never heard it, as one of anguish. Then she decided it was supposed to represent pleased surprise, colored with rapture. There was another sound through the ventilator and there was no doubt about it. Bill Weigand approached the ventilator in Mrs. Pennock's bathroom and spoke at it, firmly.

“Children,” he said. “Children! No games.”

“Do you suppose,” Pam said, in a low voice, “that they really kissed? The way it sounded? I just wonder.”

“Don't,” Bill told her. “It will just encourage them.” He spoke again to the ventilator. “Go away from there and do what I say,” he told Dorian and Jerry. “Go out into the other room and do what I said.”

There was a faint sound of movement from below, carried with reasonable clearness through the ventilator. Then there was a silence and then, much more distant, Dorian's voice.

“I've made up my mind too, Johnny. Unless you do—”

“It's a showdown, then,” Jerry said. “You can't—”

“Was that what she heard?” Pam said. “The girl and this John Elliot? Saying that?”

“Or about that,” Bill told her. “She could have, evidently. Now—”

New sounds came from the ventilator. Thudding sounds as of someone moving heavily on a carpeted floor; a louder sound, as if a chair had been knocked over.

“She heard that too,” Bill Weigand told Pam. “Or says she did. Now listen.”

There was a very faint sound, which they could hear only because they were listening closely, and which might have been the closing of the door between the sitting room and the bath-dressing room. Then, very far off, there was a continuing sound of voices. They seemed to be the voices of a man and a woman, but it would have been impossible to identify either speaker, or any of the words they used.

Weigand nodded. That fitted too; it seemed to work out as Mrs. Pennock said it worked out. So—He turned to open the door. But then Pam suddenly, quickly, shook her head and held up a warning hand and he stopped. Because there was another voice, neither Dorian's nor Jerry's, coming out of the ventilator, and the words could be distinguished.

“I hadn't,” the voice said. It was unmodulated, decisive. “But I'd just as soon. They'd like to know. Why shouldn't I?”

There was a pause. Pam guessed at it first.

“Telephone,” she said, very low. “Somebody talking on the telephone. Now the other person is talk—”

“That's right,” the voice said. “Least said, soonest mended. For you, anyway.”

There was another pause.

“What usually persuades people?” the voice said again. “You ought to know. In this case—plenty.”

There was still another pause.

“All right,” the voice said. “But it won't be cheap. I'll call you from outside in the morning. You'd better sleep on it. And visit your bank.”

Weigand waited a moment, but there was no more.

“Who?” Pam said. “Do you know?”

“Pennock,” Weigand said. “The housekeeper. Trying a shakedown on—on somebody. I'd better—”

But he broke off and looked through Pam for a moment, thinking. Then he shook his head.

“Not yet,” he said. “As Mrs. Pennock would say, give enough rope.”

“But—” Pam said. Then there was the sound of feet on the stairs, and a hammering on the bathroom door. Weigand opened it quickly and shook his head sharply at Jerry North. He motioned Pam and she followed him out of the bathroom to the hall and he closed the door behind him.

“How long do you want us to go on?” Jerry demanded. “We're running out of remarks. As Ann and John Elliot, anyway. Do you want—”

Jerry said they had done plenty, and that it had been fine. He said it had been a very useful experiment.

“More than I expected,” he said, and, leaving Pam to tell the rest, went downstairs. He went quickly to the living room floor. Then he went to the door under the stairs and opened it with no effort at quiet and went down the stairs to the kitchen floor. Mrs. Pennock was in the kitchen. She was sitting in an easy chair, reading a copy of the
New York Post.
She looked up with moderate interest when Weigand appeared.

“Checking the way he went,” Weigand told her. “Through here. Right?”

“He could have gone this way,” Mrs. Pennock agreed. “I didn't see him.” She smiled a little, with malice. “Seeing's believing,” she reported. “The stout officer was right, I guess.”

It looked that way, Weigand admitted, crossing the room. He opened the outer door. Flakes of snow swirled in. Weigand looked out into the snow, withdrew his head and closed the door. He crossed the kitchen again, taking it in with his eyes. There was a grill at one end which presumably connected with a ventilator. Under the grill, on a small wooden table, was a telephone.

Mrs. Pennock was worth keeping an eye on. Bill Weigand went upstairs to arrange for the eye. Mrs. Pennock was going to get herself into trouble, if she didn't watch out. Trouble of one kind or of another.

V.
Tuesday, 9:45 P.M. to 11:25 P.M.

Bill Weigand stopped a moment to tell Detective Stein that an eye was to be kept on Mrs. Pennock and then went toward the sound of voices into the living room. The Norths and Dorian, and Mullins too, were sitting in the living room as if they lived in it. And Pam North was talking, with some intensity.

“Suppose he didn't,” she said. “And he didn't because of the apple. Think how he feels—somebody killed the girl he was in love with and then the police grabbed him and tried to make him talk and wouldn't give him cigarettes or anything and then they just locked him up and didn't explain. Think how he feels. How would you feel?”

This evidently was to Mullins.

“Listen, Mrs. North,” Mullins said. “We didn't hurt the kid. We just asked him questions, sort of. And maybe the apple is just an apple.” Mullins paused. “That she ate,” he said, earnestly.

Pam North shook her head.

“She got the apple after he went,” she said. “She ate it and then somebody killed her. Because she couldn't get the apple the first time she tried and—”