Murder Has Its Points (4 page)

The Eighteenth Precinct, with a station house in West Fifty-fourth Street, had had its fill of snipings. Nobody had so far been caught and it did not seem likely that anybody would be. Such prankish marksmen are, in the ordinary run of things, caught either at once or not at all. (Somebody sees a rifle sticking from a window and then there is a place to start; a building to surround, to go over inch by inch.)

In none of that month's incidents had the police had luck. One man or woman, or boy or girl, might be responsible for Manhattan's four and, for that matter, for the one in the Bronx and the two in Brooklyn. This was not likely, nor, on the other hand, was it likely that the sudden sequence of such shootings was merely a matter of chance. Crackpots ape crackpots. “Might be fun to try that,” one crackpot thinks, reading of another crackpot's exploit.

“Got another one,” Detective Pearson said to Detective Foley in the squad room of the Eighteenth Precinct. “We're to get cracking, Joe. A D.O.A. this time.”

“Nobody will have seen anything,” Detective Foley said. “Also, everybody will have scrammed. If anybody heard anything, he thought it was a backfire.”

“Yep,” Detective Pearson said. “Let's get cracking, Joe.”

“The homicide boys?”

“Probably not fancy enough for them,” Detective Pearson said. “Just some poor bloke with a hole in his head, on account of this prankster sees a likely head.”

“Anybody we know?”

“Not a regular,” Pearson said. “Just some poor Joe trying to get a taxi. In front of the Dumont.”

“Some ways,” Foley said, “this is a hell of a town.”

Victim: Anthony Payne, white American; 57; 5 feet 11; 195 pounds; occupation, writer. House in Ridgefield, Connecticut; for some days staying at the Hotel Dumont. Married; wife in hotel room—fourth floor, front; under mild sedation when notified by friends. Further sedation considered necessary by house physician.

Nature of wound: Gunshot, probably .22 long rifle (autopsy to verify) in top of head. Apparent course of bullet, straight down. Unconscious almost instantly; dead in seconds; dead on the arrival of an ambulance; body removed to morgue.

“They don't grow wings,” Pearson told Foley. “Nobody was hovering over his head.”

“He leans a little this way,” Foley pointed out. “Leans a little that way. All our joker has to do is wait until he leans where wanted.”

Pamela North and Gerald North; Thomas Hathaway and Livingston Birdwood had waited. They had been asked to wait, as those closest to Payne when he died. And Mrs. North had been the one who had gone up to the room in which Lauren Payne dozed, under the mild influence of a barbiturate, and wakened her to tell her that Anthony Payne was dead.

Pam had been a little surprised by the wide-eyed, protesting shock with which her news had been received. She did not know precisely why she had been surprised; she knew nothing of the relations between Lauren and her husband. Anthony might have been all her life to Lauren Payne. Why, then, be surprised at the near-hysteria that followed shock, at the need for sedation so quickly recognized by the house physician?

They had waited in the lounge of the Dumont, with Birdwood looking often at his watch. When they arrived, Foley and Pearson looked very much like policemen in plain clothes. Pearson said it looked like being one of those things—one of those things with no sense to it.

“Might have been anybody,” Foley said. “Any one of you. Got hit, I mean.”

Pam had already thought of that, shivered at the thought of that. It might most easily have been Jerry, who had been standing closest—who had had a hand on Payne's left arm, to steady him.

“About all we can do,” Pearson said, “is to try to work out where the shot came from. See what I mean? It went straight in, looks like. As if whoever fired was shooting straight down. But it couldn't have been, because what's directly above him? Air.”

“He was—swaying a little,” Pam said. “He was—” She stopped.

“Payne had had several drinks,” Jerry said. “I suppose we all had. We'd been at a cocktail party, you see. Payne showed his, when he got out in the air especially. So—”

“Sure,” Foley said. “He swayed a little, leaned this way a little and that way a little. Which way was he leaning when it hit him?”

Jerry shook his head slowly and looked at Pam, and she shook hers. “I haven't the faintest idea,” Tom Hathaway said. “I wasn't looking at him,” Birdwood said. “I was watching the doorman trying to get a cab.”

“If it was toward this hotel,” Pearson said, “then the shot probably came from here. Or the place next door. If he was leaning toward the street, then our man could have been in the hotel across it—the—” He looked at Foley.

“King Arthur,” Foley said. “Or the hotel up the street from it. Or the roof of the parking garage.”

“It's about all we've got to go on,” Pearson said. “It's not much, is it?”

“Things like this, we never get much,” Foley said. “That's the size of it. Nobody noticed which way he was leaning? Which way he was facing?”

Still nobody had.

“I don't suppose,” Pearson said, “one of you heard the shot. To recognize? To locate?”

Nobody had.

“Not even something you thought was a backfire?”

“Not,” Pam said, “to pick out from everything else. That is, probably we all heard it but not really. If you see what I mean.”

Foley looked at Pearson. Upsetting experience this lady had had, seeing a friend shot right in front of her, having to notify his widow. Not used to things like that. “Sure,” Pearson said. “Happens that way all the time. Well—”

“No reason to keep you four here,” Foley said. “Somebody got your names?”

Somebody had.

“Just in case,” Pearson said. “Well—”

“Bill!” Pamela North said. “We're over here.”

William Weigand, captain of detectives, Homicide, Manhattan West, came across the small and pleasant lobby. He stopped in front of them and looked down.

“What's this I hear?” Bill Weigand said. “You've had another author shot out from under you, Jerry?”

Gerald North nodded his head, gloomily.

“Hell of a way to run a publishing house,” Bill Weigand said.

3

Captain William Weigand, in his small office in West Twentieth Street, had been about to call it a day, since even policemen must sometimes call a day a day. The report, coming to him as a matter of routine, that there had been another sniper victim, and this one dead, had not at first seemed sufficient reason to start the day over. It had been a long day already and had ended, satisfactorily, with an arrest—Antonio Spagalenti had not, after all, been in his office when his wife was strangled in their apartment in lower Manhattan. It did not appear to be true that the scratches on his face had been inflicted by the family cat. The Medical Examiner's laboratory reported that Mrs. Spagalenti had scratched someone. And it was easy enough to prove that Antonio Spagalenti had found a new interest in life, and a blond one.

Another sniping, and particularly a fatal one, was certainly unpleasant. It was, however, a thing which the precinct detective squad, with the precinct uniformed force, could handle as well as anyone, which probably was not going to be too satisfactorily, and no reflections on anybody. If Homicide West needed to get into it, Lieutenant Stein could lead it in. Stein had arrived when due, and been told, “Nothing but this, John,” and shown “this.” “Sniper killed, this time. Killed a man named—”

Bill Weigand had had to look again at the report to give Lieutenant John Stein the name. The victims of snipers are impersonal, being merely unlucky. “Anthony Payne,” Weigand read. “Seems to have been a writer of some—”

Bill Weigand stopped so abruptly that Stein looked at him almost anxiously. Bill Weigand said, “Damn it to hell,” using half his voice, the other half having, somehow, lost itself.

He did not know a man named Anthony Payne. But he and his wife Dorian had been invited to a cocktail party being given in celebration of the publication of a new book by an Anthony Payne and—if Antonio Spagalenti had really been scratched by the family cat—might well have gone. Invited by North Books, Inc., formally, with an informal comment: “Dinner after? G.N.” Party at—Bill checked his mind. Hotel Dumont. He looked again at the report he still held out to Lieutenant Stein. Payne had been killed in front of the Dumont.

Sergeant Aloysius Mullins had already called it a day. He would, for a few hours more, be spared the knowledge. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley was presumably at home. He would have to know. He would turn alarming red; he would, without doubt, shout, “Not again!” O'Malley would scream, in agony, “Not those
Norths
again!” He did not have instantly to know. Tomorrow the news could be broken, gently.

There was nobody on the sidewalk when Weigand reached the Hotel Dumont. There were several police cars around; there was a section of the sidewalk closed to pedestrians. Weigand went into the Dumont's lobby. He heard his name spoken in a raised, familiar voice. They were over there. They were indeed.

Now, half an hour later, they were a few blocks away, at the Hotel Algonquin, having dinner—four of them: the Norths and Weigand, a man named Tom Hathaway, to whom, after he had been identified, Bill had said, “Might help if you could come along, Hathaway. If you're not tied up.” Hathaway had not been.

It remained, Bill told them, a hundred to one that it was not Payne, as Payne, who had been killed. A man who happened to be named Payne, happened to be a moderately celebrated (Gerald North and Tom Hathaway had looked at each other a little gloomily at the modification) author, had also happened to be a target for a crackpot with a gun.

“He wasn't wearing a hat,” Pam said. “His head—well, I suppose it would have stood out a bit. Like a—well, it would shine of course—I mean—”

“Payne was very bald,” Jerry said. “That's what she means.”

“Well,” Pam said, “one has to take things into account. That is, there they are, aren't they?”

The point, to get back to it, was that it was only incidental that Payne was Payne. Hence, whatever might have happened at the party had nothing to do with what had happened after the party. So precinct had as good a chance as anyone; routine would serve if anything would serve. And routine was in progress. Foley and Pearson, and other detectives and uniformed men were going doggedly at it—were going, in the Dumont and the King Arthur opposite, from front room to front room, identifying, briefly questioning, guests who were in their rooms; sniffing, searching, in empty rooms. The smell of cordite lingers; it was hardly likely that a rifle—probably target, with telescopic sight; probably .22 calibre—would be found leaning against a wall, but one never knows until one looks. There were hotels—tall and narrow and elderly, like the Dumont itself—on either side of the Dumont. They, also, had rooms with windows on the street—many rooms. There was another hotel on one side of the King Arthur. On the other side of the King Arthur there was an office building and parking garage, with a roof. Snipers often use roofs. Now and then, although not often enough, they leave cartridge cases behind them. Once in a hundred times or so there may be identifiable fingerprints on cartridge cases. One never knows until one looks. It takes a long time to look in all possible places.

“All the same,” Pam said, bringing them again back to it, “he knocked Gardner Willings down. Mr. Willings wasn't pleased. Mr. Willings isn't used to things like that.”

The statement was made for the record, rather than as an offer of information. They all knew Willings—knew of Willings. Every literate American knew of Gardner Willings. He hunted big game in Africa and had been photographed often with a foot on it. He had written about Africa. He had been, until recently, a sports-car racer. He had written about sports-car racing. He was flamboyant. Now and then he spoke of himself in the third person. And if he was not a great writer, he was so near it as made no difference until, as was so often said, time had told. About his influence on American writing there could be no doubt whatever.

“Nowadays, every American who doesn't try to write like Hemingway tries to write like Willings,” one critic had said, which was saying it flatly, and in which there was unmistakable truth.

Gardner Willings, in short, was not a man who would like to be knocked down.

And there was, of course, another point: Gardner Willings was a notable rifle shot. Lions and tigers without number, and a rhinoceros here and there, could be brought to testify, if ghostly testimony were admissible. (And, of course, subject to translation.)

“All the same,” Bill Weigand said, “it sounds a bit preposterous, doesn't it? Grant he was annoyed—”

“Unless,” Pam said. “Before he was shot, poor Mr. Payne kept saying that Willings must be crazy. And there's something about that somewhere—great something is—”

“‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied,'” Jerry said. “Dryden.”

“So terribly literate,” Pam said, fondly. “On the other hand, I thought that Willings had merely too much taken. And Mr. Payne, poor man, was a bit of a twerp, all things considered.”

She was looked at, waited for.

“Not evidence,” Pam said. “One woman's opinion. And I'm not impartial. I don't like his books.”

Jerry sighed.

“This new one,” Pam said. “It's called
The Liberated
. It ought to be called,
The Dismembered
.” She looked at Jerry. “Which you know perfectly well,” she said. “Where was I?”

“Admit a spot of torture here and there,” Jerry said. “A bit of sadism. We don't offer it as a juvenile.”

“Catering,” Pam said. “I won't say pandering.” She paused to consider. “On the other hand,” Pam said, “I will say pandering.”