Murder Is Suggested (3 page)

But the reason Bill Weigand and Mullins stared at her was not related to her appearance. The reason was that the young woman had walked out of the closet.

2

Bill Weigand looked from the young woman to Sergeant Aloysius Mullins, and looked by instinct and with sympathy. Events were baffling enough to Weigand; what, he thought, must they be to Mullins? A look told him.

It was not so much surprise that flooded over Sergeant. Mullins's large, always somewhat reddened, face. Surprise was there, of course—surprise, disbelief, even consternation. But under those things, the basis of those things, was a great indignation, a great anger. This, Mullins's face said, was beyond acceptance. This went too far—this went a helluva lot too far. This—

“All right, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said, gently, and turned back to the girl, who was looking from one to the other of them, eyes very round—very startled. But when she spoke, it was to Carl Hunter. Her voice was unexpectedly low, vibrant.

“Carl,” she said. “Carl—what is it? What's happened?”

“Screwy,” Sergeant Mullins said, in a faraway voice. “That's what it is—screwy.”

But it was clear that he spoke only to himself, a man withdrawn from that which could not be tolerated.

“Where's Uncle Jamey?” the girl said.

“Faith—” Carl Hunter said but, instead of going on, looked at Weigand, left it to him.

“I'm sorry,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell is dead. He was—shot.” He looked at the desk and the girl looked and then raised both hands to her thin face and covered her face, and the tips of her slim fingers rubbed against her forehead, as if to lessen sudden pain. They waited. After a few seconds the tall girl lowered her hands. Her eyes seemed more than ever too large for her thin, now very pale, face.

“Your uncle?” Bill Weigand said.

For an instant she looked at him as if she had not heard him, almost as if she did not see him. But then she shook her head.

“Not really,” she said. “I called him that. Always. Since I was a little girl. Killed? Just—sitting there and somebody shot him?”

Some things must be repeated before they become real.

“Yes,” Bill Weigand said.

“I'm Faith Oldham,” the girl said. “We live downstairs.”

“Down—” Bill began, and did not finish. Instead he went past the girl to the closet. She had left the door partly open and he opened it more widely. Of course—it should all along have been obvious. Not a closet, really—not primarily a closet. A passage into the house next door. What he had taken to be the back wall of the closet was a door. Yes—a sliding door, open now. He went through into the house next door, into a room which, in size and shape, was a twin of the professor's office. But not in furnishing—this other room was carpeted, as the office was not; here heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. There was faint illumination in the room from a ceiling light. Weigand went back into the room Elwell had died in.

“Downstairs in the other house?” Bill said to the girl, who looked at him as if the question surprised her but then said, “Yes. Of course. My mother and I—”

It was not, once explained, in any special way remarkable. Jameson Elwell had owned two houses, side by side, shoulder to shoulder and wall to wall. He occupied all of one and the top floor of the other, and had had a passage opened through and used the double thickness of the two house walls as storage space. And the curtained room?

“He called it the laboratory,” Carl Hunter said. “Carried on—experiments. Psychological experiments. Psychological—enquiries.”

“I see,” Bill said, but was not sure he did see. “With animals?”

“Animals?” Hunter repeated. The girl merely stood and looked at Hunter. “Oh—you're thinking of Pavlov? Thorndike? No. That is, not here. That's done at the university. We've got a project now with cats that may—” He stopped and shook his head impatiently. “Which is neither here nor there,” he said. “This—I suppose the word ‘laboratory' gives the wrong impression to a layman. A room to talk to people in. A—quiet room.” He looked at Weigand sharply. “Nothing mysterious,” he said. “And certainly nothing to do with what's happened.”

The uneasiness, the uncertainty, had gone from Carl Hunter's manner. He seemed now quite sure of himself. Too sure, at least of the point he made. There was no telling, yet, what it had to do or did not have to do with what had happened.

For one thing, it was evident that Higgins's locking of the service door, the automatic locking of the front door when Hunter went out of it—if he had, whenever he had—proved nothing one way or the other. Clearly, anyone—including a murderer—might get from one house to the other through the “laboratory.” As Faith Oldham just had.

“Miss Oldham,” Weigand said. “It is
Miss
Oldham?”

She looked at him, now, but as if she had returned from a long journey.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Miss.”

“Did Professor Elwell expect you this evening?”

“Expect—oh. There wasn't anything definite. When—when I want to see him I come through the other room and knock and if he's not busy—” She put her fingers to her curved, full lips. “That's the way it—used to be,” she said, the low voice muffled.

“You come—?” Bill said, and his voice was almost as low as the girl's.

“When—when I want to ask him something,” she said. “When I'm worried. He's like—he was like—I don't know. He knew so much. Was so—kind.”

A childlike quality persisted. Then, abruptly, it vanished.

“Who killed him?” she said, and her tone demanded. “Why would anybody kill him?”

“I don't know,” Weigand said. “It only happened a few hours ago. Apparently, just after Mr. Hunter left him. Did he say anything about expecting someone, Mr. Hunter? Another student, perhaps?”

“Don't you think I'd have told you if he had?” Hunter said. “No.”

“And you,” Weigand said. “You came to ask him something too, Mr. Hunter?”

“No,” Hunter said. “The other way around. This project—no use going into that. He was supervising it, of course. A lot of us are doing the spade work. I brought him some tabulations to check over. One of us—usually I was the one—brought him data two or three times a week.”

“Look,” Mullins said, “what did you say this project was about? Did you say cats, mister?”

Bill did not quite smile. It was so evident that Mullins hoped, hoped anxiously, that the project was not about cats. But Hunter and the girl merely looked, a little blankly, at the large sergeant.

“Why?” Hunter said. “Yes. It's about cats. Their varying reactions to stimuli under—” He snapped his fingers. “Don't start me on that,” he said. “Why?”

“Cats,” Mullins repeated. He spoke as a man whose worst fears have been confimed. Men broke clocks, young women came out of closets and now—cats. Omens.

“Another screwy one,” Sergeant Mullins said, as much to himself as to Captain William Weigand.

“They're not in it,” Weigand said, gently.

“They will be,” Mullins told him. Mullins spoke from an abyss.

Hunter and Faith Oldham looked from one policeman to the other.

“This girl you were going to meet at the bookshop,” Weigand said to Hunter. “You said she was late?”

“
Carl
,” the girl said. “I—I told you. I couldn't—”

“Never mind,” Hunter said, and smiled at the tall girl and there was, Bill thought, warmth and reassurance in his smile and—and more? There was no use guessing.

“How late were you, Miss Oldham?” Bill asked her.

“About twenty minutes,” she said. “It was supposed to be three o'clock and—
Carl. Does it matter?”

“Jamey was killed a little after three, they say,” Carl Hunter told her. “If we'd been together at the bookshop—” He shrugged.

The tall girl turned on Weigand. Her face was not pale now. Her face was flushed. She was quite a different person now from the tall, uneasy girl who had walked into the room and stopped, abashed.

“You're not crazy enough to think Carl—Carl knows anything about this,” she said. “Nobody could be that—”

“Wait,” Bill said. “Mr. Hunter's ahead of us. He was here this afternoon. Of course we have to find out what we can about when he left. And—”

She did not wait.

“What you're saying,” she said, “is that he needs an alibi. Isn't that what you're saying?”

Her tone accused.

“I—” Weigand began, but was interrupted. Sergeant Mullins had returned.

“Lady,” Sergeant Mullins said, and spoke to a child. “A good alibi never hurt anybody. Whether he needs it or don't need it.”

“For the record,” Hunter said, “I didn't kill Professor Jameson Elwell.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Now—about this laboratory. Let's have a look at it.”

He led them into it, pausing long enough to confirm the obvious—that the door into the office, from the “closet” which was only incidentally a closet, could be locked against entrance from the office, but not against entrance to the office. Which seemed at first a little odd, but did not a moment later. To get into the “laboratory” from the other house one needed a key. Weigand opened that door, looked at the top of a flight of stairs and closed the door again.

“You have a key, of course,” he told Faith Oldham. “Anybody else you know of? Your mother?”

“No,” she said. “I don't know about anybody else. Uncle Jamey gave me a key so I could—if I needed to talk to him I mean—come this way instead of going outside and up through the other house and—” She stopped. “I don't know about any other keys,” she said.

“The door downstairs,” Bill said. “The front door. Of this house. It's kept locked, of course?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don't—oh, you mean somebody could have got in through our house? I don't mean ours, really—it was his house. Mother and I just—rent the lower floors. That's what you mean?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “If somebody had a key to the front door, another key to this door”—he pointed—“he could come up without you or your mother seeing him? Or—hearing him?”

How, she wanted to know, could she answer that? It depended on where they were in the house. On whether they were in the house at all. This afternoon, for example—this afternoon she had left the house at about three to meet Hunter at the bookshop. Her mother had been there at the time, but had been dressed to go out, ready to go out. When she had actually gone only she could tell them. “But she's not home now,” Faith Oldham said. “This is her bridge night.”

“Servants?”

She smiled at that, smiled faintly. “Not for a long time,” Faith Oldham said. “Not for years and years. You see, daddy—” She stopped. She shook her head, as if at herself. “Look,” she said. “I told you we rented our part of the house. We—well, we don't. Uncle Jamey just lets—just let—us live there. Because he and daddy—Anyway, that's the way it is. And—that's the way he—was.”

It had taken effort, Bill Weigand thought. It had taken honesty.

“After you two met,” he said. “At the bookshop. At around twenty minutes after three—” He waited a moment. Hunter nodded his head and the nod said, All right so far.

He had moved a little closer to the girl.

“What did you do the rest of the afternoon?”

“I don't see—” Hunter said and looked with raised eyebrows at Bill Weigand, who did not precisely see either, except that one does not press always at a single spot. “Went to a lecture—lecture on contemporary drama—at the Hartley Theater. That's part of the university, you know.” He seemed to doubt Weigand did. “Right,” Bill said.

“Lasted an hour and a half,” Carl Hunter said. “Or thereabouts. Beginning at four. Then—well, we walked around for a while and talked for a while, and went to a place and had a drink and then—well, then, Faith had to go home. And I went back to watch the cats.”

He looked at Mullins when he said that. Mullins did not look at him.

Faith Oldham had come home; she had “helped” with the dinner. Her mother had been home then. At about eight her mother had gone toward bridge. Faith had washed up, and read a while and then—

“There was something I wanted to ask Uncle Jamey,” she said and then covered her face again and her thin shoulders began to shake. And Carl Hunter went to her and put an arm around her shoulders, and held her.

“Listen,” he said, “that's all we know.”

“Right,” Bill said, not knowing whether it was right or not, but only that there are times to press and times to give. “If anything else comes up—”

Which let them go. They went, together, toward the door. “By the way,” Bill said, as they neared it, “I think I'd better take the key, Miss Oldham. You won't have any more use for it. And we like—”

She brought the key back to him. She did not say anything.

“So?” Hunter said.

“Good night,” Bill said. “We'll know where to find you, if we need to.”

As, he thought, when the door closed behind them—the girl was almost as tall as Hunter—they probably would.

“Why laboratory?” Mullins said, as they looked around the room. “No test tubes.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Now that's something,” he said. “Acoustic ceiling. And the curtains and carpet and all.”

Bill nodded. A room built for silence, for concentration. And, certainly, with no test tubes. A laboratory of the mind, if one at all.

A desk, not as large as the one in the office. A leather couch with a table beside it and, on the table, a tape recorder. A chair beside the couch. Across the room, a table phonograph. At the end of the room most distant from the windows, two doors. Bill indicated them with his head and Mullins opened one, which led to a bathroom. He opened the other, which opened on a corridor. Mullins went down the corridor and, almost at once, returned.