Murder Comes First (20 page)

In country cottages, she decided, there must be flashlights, and the most likely place for them would be—she began pulling out the few kitchen drawers available. She found two flashlights in the second drawer, but the first of them apparently was broken. At least, when Miss Lucinda pressed the button, nothing happened. The second produced a tired, yellow radiance. She hoped it would be enough. She returned to the cellar door, opened it—it apparently closed by itself, as a result of something in its hinges—and let yellow light trickle down steep stairs. It looked to Miss Lucinda like a place for rats.

My head is bloody but unbowed, Miss Lucinda told herself and went cautiously down the steep stairs. The door closed behind her.

“I don't,” Pam North said, coming to what certainly was almost a full stop at the entrance to the Hawthorne circle, “see how she got onto it. I thought all along it was the other way around, of course. And she just pulls it out—out of that pink hat.” Pam swung around the circle into the Taconic State parkway. “It'll be dark before we get there,” she said.

The speed limits on the Taconic State are slightly more lenient than on the Saw Mill, where only forty is allowed. On the Taconic, one may legally do forty-five. Pam, encouraged, reached toward seventy. “While it's still light,” she said.

“You don't,” Dorian told Pamela, “actually know she
is
onto it. I mean, you don't know she has it right. As a matter of fact, Pam, you don't know you have either.”

She was invited to tell any other way it could have been. She hesitated.

“Anyway,” Pam said, “we'll know in an hour or so, probably. If we”—she pulled around a car doing a mere sixty; she told her steering wheel that some people oughtn't to be allowed on parkways, which were for people going somewhere—“don't get lost,” she said. “Unless—Dor, whatever made her? The frail, sweet, little—Dor, it scares me!”

“At the moment,” Dorian said, “we scare me too. Particularly if you're right. I hope Bill—”

What he had, Inspector O'Malley told Weigand, was nothing but a hunch. Suppose he was right, where was he?

“So you've got a theory about this Mrs. Sandford,” he said. “You think maybe you know where she is. So—what have you got? Where does the Logan kill come in?”

Bill could, he said, only guess. He would guess that, somehow, Mrs. Logan had found out about Mrs. Sandford and, because of that, had been fed cyanide.

“It's screwy,” the inspector said. He sat behind his desk, red of face. “That Thompkins,” he said. “Like you, Bill. Making it hard.” He grew redder. “And,” he said, “she's the aunt of this Mrs. North of yours. Don't forget that. What've you got to say about that?”

Bill knew how the inspector felt. He said so.

“You want to make captain, don't you?” the inspector asked. “Do you or don't you?”

“Right,” Bill said. “Sure I do.”

“Well?” the inspector demanded.

Conversations with Arty often got out of hand, Bill Weigand thought sadly. If the Norths were anywhere involved, and it seemed they frequently were, the inspector could no more avoid buzzing angrily, like an incensed bumblebee, around that fact than he could—Bill's mind paused. “Jump through the moon.” The phrase came to him unsolicited, unwanted, and for a moment unrecognized. Oh—it was Pam who said that, presumably feeling that jumping through the moon was a feat even more unlikely than jumping over it.

“Well?” Inspector O'Malley repeated.

“Look,” Bill Weigand said. “You know as well as I do, sir—better than I do—that Thompkins can't take it to court. Not with the fingerprint angle. Not with the reports from Cleveland. We'll just have to give that one up.”

The “we” was generous, Bill thought. Arty would have to give it up. And Arty would, Arty already had. Much as he might like to see any aunt of Mrs. Gerald North's in as much hot water as was available, Inspector Artemus O'Malley was a cop, and knew the score. He could still fume about it, but he'd lost his candy.

“You want to have another go at Sandford, then?” Inspector O'Malley said, tacitly admitting he had given up the candy. “But there's this other angle?”

That was the size of it, Bill said. He had as good as been warned off. But that was when he was unofficial, or as unofficial as a cop who is never off duty can well get.

“Who do they think they are?” Inspector O'Malley asked the world. “This is our town, ain't it?”

“Right,” Bill said. “Our town. Our murder.”

“What you do,” O'Malley said, “is get hold of this Sandford. Make him come clean about his wife. That's what you do. Who do those guys think they are?”

“You'll clear it with them if there's a squawk?” Bill asked.

He was damned right the inspector would. Who did they think they were?

It was unnecessary to tell the inspector that they thought, rightly, that they were agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; that they thought they had something coming along they didn't want tampered with; that they suspected the local police might upset their much prized apple-cart.

“The way I look at it,” Inspector O'Malley told Lieutenant Weigand. “Murder comes first. I don't give a damn who this Sandford is. You put it up to him.”

Bill Weigand said, “Right.” He went.

He went, he drove to Barton Sandford's apartment; he did not find Barton Sandford. He drove uptown to Gimo's Restaurant in the East Fifties. Sandford was not there. From Gimo's, he telephoned his apartment. Nobody answered his call. It was after five, then; Dorian and Pam were having quite an afternoon for themselves. He tried the North apartment, and again got no answer. It was only then he realized how surely he had expected Dorian and Pam to be at the Norths', their day's work—whatever it had been—done; the time for cocktails arrived. It was only then he realized he was beginning to be worried.

There are few greater fallacies than the belief that, because a man can write well enough to get books published, he can make a speech to several hundred women without falling flat on his face. This fact Jerry considered morosely in the club car as he sipped, also morosely, at the Pennsylvania Railroad's version of a martini.

“I was terrible,” the shaggy man in the next seat told Jerry North. “Don't tell me I stank.” He drank scotch.

“You were all right,” Jerry told Ferguson, with gloomy insincerity. “How about another drink?”

“I might as well,” Ferguson said. “Or shoot myself. You talked me into it, remember.”

“You were fine,” Jerry said. “As good as anybody.”

“God!” Ferguson said, simply.

Jerry hoped that Pam hadn't got herself into trouble. He hoped she had stayed home, or gone to the Welby and held the hands of aunts. He hoped he never had to hear writers speak again. He hoped he never again had to scratch at a hotel's luncheon version of broiled spring chicken. He had little confidence in the fulfillment of any of these hopes.

“Tell you what,” Ferguson said, from the middle of his new scotch. “I write 'em, you sell 'em. How's that?”

“Next time,” Jerry told him. “You've got Boston coming up Friday, remember. Can't get out of that now. Very fine audience at Boston.”

“God,” Ferguson said, and finished the scotch. He looked out the window. “Newark,” he said, in the same tone. “You going along to Boston?”

“Kennely'll be along on that one,” Jerry told him. Which is something, he told himself.

“God,” said Ferguson. “I should have been a painter.”

“They have to show up at shows,” Jerry told him, and finished the martini.

“A traveling salesman,” Ferguson said. He qualified it.

Now, Jerry thought, we get the Hemingway routine.

“Speaking of Hemingway,” Ferguson said, unexpectedly, “what the hell was the idea—”

Hemingway lasted them through the tunnel. It lasted Ferguson into a taxicab and Jerry into another. Whatever else you could say, Hemingway was durable. Perhaps it would have been better if Ferguson had talked about Hemingway at the luncheon.

Jerry's cab struggled in traffic, taking many minutes to get nowhere; half an hour to get where it was going. It was some time after five then. But Jerry need not have hurried. The apartment was empty, even of Martha. It took him several minutes of anxious search to find Pam's note which, for reasons not immediately apparent to her husband, she had tucked under one of the telephones. Jerry used the telephone.

There she was now, Bill Weigand thought, hearing the telephone ringing through the apartment door. And here he was, on the wrong side of the door, digging anxiously for his keys, convinced that each summons from the telephone would be its last. He jammed key into keyhole, pushed resentfully at the door, reached the telephone and said, “Yes.”

“Bill,” Jerry said. “Pam left a note. Dorian's with her.”

Bill sat down. It seemed like a good idea.

“Go ahead,” he told Jerry North. Jerry went ahead.

“Here's the note,” he said. “Listen. ‘It's Aunt Lucy now, and I was all wrong the whole time. We've gone to Patterson.' She signed it and then added a postscript. ‘Don't worry, Dorian's with me.' Patterson?”

“Damn,” Bill said.

“I know,” Jerry said. “Feel the same way. What's Patterson New Jersey got to do with it?”

“New York,” Bill said. “At least, I suppose so. The Logans have a summer place up there. The Sandfords too. Damn it to hell.”

“What about Aunt Lucy?” Jerry said. “I've been in Philadelphia all day.”

“I don't know,” Bill said. “I'll find out. You're home?”

Jerry was. He would wait.

It did not take long. Bill called Jerry North back with the information, imparted it crisply.

“Pam's taken our car,” Jerry said. “We'll have to use yours. Want me to—”

“I'll pick you up,” Bill told him. “It's—I'm afraid they've really stuck their necks out this time.”

“When I get
hold
of her,” Jerry promised him. “I'll be downstairs,” he added.

The cellar was very small, extending only under part of the kitchen, and under none of the rest of the house. Once, Miss Lucinda decided, it had been used as a root cellar. Now it had in it what was apparently a heater of some sort, a few bare shelves and, obscurely, an ancient rocking chair. It was damp and smelled of mold, and the dripping yellow light from her torch did hardly more than intensify, by dimly contrasting with, utter darkness. But Miss Lucinda could discover that the floor was cemented, and she went very slowly, very carefully, very resolutely over the floor, all the time hearing sounds which might be made by rats. Once, in a corner, her light picked up a reflection and she thought it came from the eyes of some animal, from a rat's eyes, and almost screamed before she realized that rats, unpleasant as they are in all particulars, are commonly not cyclopean and discovered that the reflection came from a tiny shard of broken glass.

But she did not find what she expected—indication that the cement floor had been broken and then replaced. She could not be sure of this; it was not a subject on which she was at all informed. But she was certain there would be something to show—an irregularity, a difference in color—something to be seen if one looked for it. And, however she looked for it, there was nothing.

Then it must be outside, and that was—well, clearly, that was beyond her. That was a labor of Hercules, or at least of several men with—with shovels. (Or was it spades?) It was, Miss Lucinda reflected, Adam who delved, while Eve span. She would have to get back to somebody and—well, spin her yarn. She could, she assured herself, a tale unfold. It was absurd, indeed, that no one else, apparently, had noticed how all this and the famous one ran parallel, or almost. And then she thought—goodness, whatever did I say in that note? She remembered very well, however; and remembered she had still been wrong. But would anyone, then, be able to make anything of it? Make something of it and—come?

Miss Lucinda started for the steep staircase. She must, in some way, get back.

Then she heard, above, the unmistakable sound of people walking, and hurried toward the staircase. They had come after all. They—She heard voices and, half way up the steep stairs, stopped. They were not the voices of anyone who would, having got her note and understood it, have come after her.

“—if she is, it is,” a man's voice said. “We know that. And she is—”

The voice was familiar to Miss Lucinda, near the top of the cellar stairs now, listening close to the door. It was—why, it was Paul Logan's voice! What was he doing here?

“—only guessing,” a girl's voice said, and this voice Miss Lucinda did not recognize. But if it was a girl it was probably Rose Hickey's daughter. What was her name? Lynn—that was it.

The two were moving around as they talked. They were opening things and closing them. It sounded as if they were looking for something, as she had been. She could tell them it would be no use. But why were they here?

“—talked yourself into it,” the girl said. “Trying to prove to Mrs. North and that friend of hers that you and—”

They went, moving with the light, quick steps of youth, into the large bedroom, and Miss Lucinda could no longer hear what they said. Very cautiously, she opened the door. Now she could hear, or almost hear.

“—typewriter, for one thing—” Paul Logan said, and then must, from the muffled sound, have put his head into the closet or, possibly, under a bed. The girl said nothing, but appeared to be opening and closing the drawers of the chests. That puzzled Miss Lucinda.
It
couldn't be in one of those.

“—with her,” Paul said, taking his head, apparently, out of whatever it had been in. “That would be the payoff. If you don't think the clothes are.”