Murder Is Suggested

Murder Is Suggested

A Mr. and Mrs. North Mystery

Frances and Richard Lockridge

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

In Memory of the Cat Named

Martini

1945–1959

1

Standing at the third-floor window, William Weigand could look north and west and see the Hudson River. He could not, to be sure, see a great deal of it—a narrow slice of river had been Professor Jameson Elwell's share. Such views are rationed in Manhattan, and rationed grudgingly. But there was moonlight on what Weigand could see of the Hudson; a tug, coaxing a string of barges upstream, moved in whiteness against black shadows etched on shining water. Weigand closed his eyes, which were tired, and opened them again to see the river fresh. A moment of tranquillity—

Someone knocked at the door of the room which had, evidently, been Professor Elwell's office and Weigand turned from the window and nodded to Sergeant Mullins, who opened the door. “Mr. Carl Hunter,” a policeman who remained invisible told Mullins, and a tall young man in a narrow gray suit—a man in a button-down shirt; a man with close-trimmed hair—came into the room. He stopped just inside the door, which closed behind him and said, “You wanted to see me?” and then, without waiting for an answer, walked across the room to a wide desk.

There was a small, silver clock on the desk. The young man in the gray suit picked the clock up and looked at it. He turned it over in his hands and wound it, and looked at it again. Then he took two long steps away from the desk and threw the clock into the black mouth of a fireplace. It broke noisily. The young man looked at the remains of the clock for a moment, brushed his hands together briskly and turned back to face Captain William Weigand, of Homicide, Manhattan West, and Sergeant Aloysius Mullins.

The young man had a square face and intelligent-looking gray eyes.

He said, “You wanted—?” and then, it was evident, was stopped by what he saw in the faces he looked at. This was understandable; Mullins's mouth was somewhat open. Mullins's blue eyes were filled with consternation.

“Oh,” Mr. Carl Hunter said, in the tone of one who has just got the point. “I suppose you want—” With that, before he paused again, he seemed a little irritated. “It kept on losing time,” he said. “What's the use of a clock that keeps on losing time?”

Mullins said, “Lookit, mister,” in a harsh voice. “What you think you're—”

“All right, Mullins,” Weigand said, and Mullins—who is a large man with the appearance of a policeman—said, with reluctance, “O.K., Loot. Only—”

“Do you always break clocks that run slow, Mr. Hunter?” Weigand asked the young man, who looked puzzled for a moment and then shook his head, but shook it uncertainly. The question seemed to have made him uneasy.

“I guess not,” he said. “Silly thing to do, wasn't it? Be interesting to trace the psychological motivation if—” He let that trail off. “They tell me,” he said, “that a pretty bad thing's happened. That Professor Elwell—”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell's dead, Mr. Hunter. Been dead since a little after three this afternoon.”

“The man who came around,” Hunter said. “Said you wanted to see me—what he said was, ‘The captain would like to ask you a couple of things'—he said ‘about an accident.' But from the look of things—”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell was murdered, Mr. Hunter. It must have been quite soon after you left this afternoon.”

“He was fine when I left,” Hunter said, quickly. And that was what Weigand had supposed he would say, since it could hardly be expected that, under the circumstances, he would say anything else.

“Right,” Weigand said again. “I wonder if you—”

He paused. Mullins had crossed to the fireplace. He looked down at the clock momentarily and then squatted and picked the clock up. He looked at it and then looked at the watch on his thick wrist. He stood up, then.

“Funny thing, Loot-I-mean-captain,” Mullins said. “Clock says nine-thirteen. And you know what time it is? Nine-seventeen. So when this character threw it there and it stopped—see what I mean?” He looked at Weigand; then, with a different expression, at the young man in the narrow gray suit. “So what about it, mister?” Mullins said.

“When I looked at it—” Carl Hunter said, but then he seemed momentarily bewildered. “I was sure it was slow,” he said. Now uneasiness was in his voice.

It was, Weigand thought, the uneasiness of a puzzled man. Or, of course, of a man who wished to appear puzzled. The investigation could not, Bill Weigand thought, be said to be beginning in a very orderly fashion. It was almost as if—He smiled faintly to himself, although he did not feel particularly like smiling, and had not for several hours. The affair was starting in a “screwy” fashion. But Mr. and Mrs. North were not in it. At least—

He had got into it himself rather later than he would have liked. He had got back to his office in West Twentieth Street at a few minutes after five, intending only a quick look around before calling it a day, and feeling altogether ready to call it a day. He was tired, then, and his throat was dry and his eyes smarted. He had smoked too many cigarettes in courtroom corridors, and been too bored. Home and a cool drink—it was warm for October—and the tranquillity which, at such parched moments, was to be found also in the quiet of greenish eyes and the clarity of—

He was standing at his desk, calling it a day (and good riddance) when the telephone rang. It was not any telephone, ringing for any policeman. Send not to ask, Weigand thought gloomily, and picked the instrument up and said, “Weigand.”

“His nibs,” the telephone said.

“Put him on,” Weigand said and, instinctively, held the receiver at a little distance from his ear.

“Where the hell have
you
been?” Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley shouted. Weigand removed the receiver further from his ear. The inspector could put a really nasty emphasis on the word “you.” Also, the inspector knew perfectly well where Weigand had been. Such matters are not unrecorded.

“General Sessions,” Weigand said. “Summoned as a rebuttal witness in the case of People of the State of New York versus ‘Puggy' Wormser. To testify that, no, we didn't beat him with rubber hose.”

“Didn't we?” O'Malley asked, momentarily diverted.

“No.”

“Kid gloves,” O'Malley said. “That's what's the trouble nowadays. G.d. kid gloves.”

It was a subject by which Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley could easily be diverted. O'Malley was a graduate of the school of hard knocks, which he believed it more blessed to give than to receive. Left to himself he would expatiate indefinitely on the theme.

“You wanted me?” Weigand said, not leaving O'Malley to himself.

To this, Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley said, “Huh?” in honest, but momentary, bewilderment. He made up for it. He said, “What did you think I called for, captain?” Weigand withdrew the receiver another half inch from his ear. He said, mildly, that he had just got in. There was no point in saying that he had, also, been just about to go off. It was already evident that he wasn't.

“Some g.d. professor's got himself killed,” O'Malley said. (He said “g.d.,” circumventing the Holy Name Society.) “Seems like he's got a name.” O'Malley disliked murder victims who had names. Names stirred up newspapers. “Sent it through hours ago.”

“I was—” Weigand began.

“I know where you were,” O'Malley said. “You think I can't hear, Bill? What the hell's the matter with that outfit of yours?”

“Nothing,” Weigand said. “If it came through, somebody's on it. Lieutenant Graham—no, he's on the Birdy kill. Mullins, probably.”

“Find out,” O'Malley said. “Get on it. You young squirts.”

“Right,” Weigand said.

“Keep in touch,” O'Malley said. “I'll be home. Or maybe at Paddy's Grill. That is, if there's something you can't handle. Otherwise—”

“Right,” Weigand said.

He hung up, complete with instructions—and, in spite of weariness, of acute realization that policemen may not plan on tranquil evenings, somewhat amused. There was only one O'Malley, and he to be disturbed only if the heavens fell. And a good cop, all the same, and an appreciative one. (Hence Weigand's captaincy, fairly early on, although Bill Weigand could not convincingly argue, even to himself, that he was
too
young a squirt.) Weigand used the telephone again.

Mullins was on it, along with the precinct men and, in the normal course, a detective assigned to the district attorney's Homicide Bureau. Along, also, with lab men, with photographers, with, in a word, everybody.

“It” had begun at precisely eleven minutes after three o'clock on that afternoon of Wednesday, October twenty-second.

It had begun with a sound in the ears of a young woman who had said, with professional cheer, “Operator?”

The voice had been that of a man—a man who spoke with obvious and great effort, as if each articulated sound took more strength than the man had left.

“This is emerg—” the man said, and the voice faded.

“I don't—” the operator began, and the other words came—came faint, came in gasps, so that they were just understandable. “
Doctor
,” the man said. “Been shot. Ambu—”

But there the words stopped.

“I'm sorry, sir,” the operator said, automatically. And then said, “Hello? Hel
lo!
” And there was no answer at all.

The line remained open, which helped. An open line from a dial telephone may be tracked down, given time enough. It was tracked down. The call had come from the number listed to Jameson Elwell, who lived on the upper west side of Manhattan, on one of the streets which slope sharply down from West End Avenue toward Riverside Drive.

But the tracing of calls from dial telephones does take time, and the uniformed men of the first squad car found Jameson Elwell dead. He had bled to death from a gunshot wound, in what was clearly his office on the third and top floor of a narrow house. There had indeed been nobody else in the house when the police arrived. It had been necessary to force the door of the house—the heavy door with polished brass knob, two steps below sidewalk level. That had taken time, also, and it had taken more time to find Jameson Elwell, since they had, quite naturally, worked upward through the house.

He was slumped over his desk, his hand still on the telephone, but the hand limp now. The desk blotter was soaked with his blood, and blood had trickled to the floor around the desk. But it would not, the assistant medical examiner said, when he had looked and touched, have made any real difference if they had got there more quickly. With a bullet so near the heart, the remarkable thing was that Jameson Elwell had been able to dial the operator, to say as much as he had said—almost to complete the word “ambulance.”