Murder within Murder (9 page)

She was struck more than ever on second reading by the attitude which Amelia Gipson had, perhaps unwittingly, displayed toward the whole matter. It was not clear that Miss Gipson was revolted, or even that she was sickened, although the case might revolt or sicken almost anyone. It was more that Miss Gipson disapproved; she seemed, Pam thought, to disapprove of the sexual irregularity involved almost more than she did of the murder. Reading the script, Pam North could imagine that Miss Gipson had washed her hands as she finished each sentence of her notes.

“The evidence showed that, for almost a year before the crime, Clara Bright and Thomas Judson had been involved in a degraded love affair, with the attendant weakening of moral fiber,” Pam read. Her eyes widened slightly. She wondered how Miss Gipson knew that there had been an attendant weakening of moral fibre; how she knew that the love affair had been “degraded.”

Excessive, maybe, Pam thought. She remembered some of the testimony which had been rather guardedly hinted at in the newspapers. She remembered that she was not then of an age which, in the opinion of her mother, made such reading appropriate and that she had sometimes been put to considerable trouble to get the full story, which
The New York Times
published so extensively under demure headlines. Physical, undoubtedly, she added to herself. But why degraded?

Pam thought about it. Clara and Thomas had, certainly, turned out to be degraded people, and very crude murderers. And their love affair had been, for want of a better term, very physical. But their degradation had been displayed in the murder—in their cold, ruthless hunting down of a harmless, middle-aged man; in their failure to be revolted either by the idea of murder or the actual, and messy, carrying out of murder. How they had comported themselves as lovers was, Pam thought, another matter. They had not, perhaps, been fastidious. They had, certainly, been selfish. They had broken, with a frequency rather overwhelming, the New York statute against adultery.

But “degraded” seemed still a rather stern word. The matter was one of taste. Some people preferred to live one way and not a few people preferred to live much as Clara and Thomas had, this side of murder. It was clear that Miss Gipson disapproved of such and that her disapproval had unexpected violence.

“It's as if she hated—oh, all of it,” Pam said, and again she spoke aloud to herself. “Our being animals.”

Pam North stood up, almost instinctively, and stretched. She could feel her muscles moving and the silk of the dressing-gown against her skin.

“Really,” Pam said, “that was very foolish of her. Because in a way it's fun being animal.” She thought. “Much more than being mineral, I should think,” she added. “And certainly than vegetable and always in one place.”

She showered, scrubbing herself. It was pleasant to feel clean. That was because of the Bright-Judson case, probably. Or was it, Pam wondered, because of Miss Gipson's attitude toward the Bright-Judson case? It was hard, Pam thought, to determine which seemed the more unwholesome. Fortunately, she thought, putting on a pale green wool dress over nothing in particular, she didn't have to. What she had to do was to get in touch with Bill Weigand. Then, looking at herself in the mirror, she thought of Jerry, as she usually did when she thought she was looking rather nice. Jerry had said not to do anything until she told him first.

Jerry and Pamela North, Bill Weigand and Sergeant Mullins sat, in that order, on bar stools at Charles. Jerry looked tired, and there was a bump on his head; Bill Weigand looked both weary and puzzled; and Mullins stared with a kind of reproach on his face into the glass which had held an old-fashioned. Pam, who looked neither tired nor puzzled, fished the olive out of her martini glass, nibbled it around and said that it oughtn't to be long now before they had Noilly Prat back.

“Otherwise,” she said, “it's very much like old times.”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said, earnestly, “there's absolutely no reason to connect the two. It's merely intuition.” He considered. “Of a very low order,” he added.

Pam said she wished he wouldn't say that. She said intuition had nothing to do with it.

“She'd worked on four cases,” Pam pointed out, as if explaining to children. “If we grant that she found out something in one of them that made her dangerous to somebody, where are we?”

Bill Weigand said to wait a minute. He said they didn't grant it. He said they had no real reason to think it.

“We have,” he pointed out, “at least two people who profit by her death. Her nephew and niece. We have a man—a rather odd duck—she had got thrown out of a job, with the result that he's gone to pot. We may have half a dozen other things. Real things, Pam.”

“Sometimes,” Pam said, “I think you think money is the root of all murder.”

Bill was undisturbed. He said it usually was. He said it almost always was except when murder was sudden, violent, unpremeditated.

“Money,” he said, “or safety. Which are very often the same thing. Certainly, it's the first place to look.”

That was all right, Pam agreed. She said that if he widened it that much—put in safety—it would still cover her theory.

“Because,” she said, “my theory supposes Miss Gipson became dangerous to the safety of a person who was already a murderer. In this case, an unsuspected one.”

“Yours isn't a theory, Pam,” Jerry said. “It's a leap. Out of the dark; into the dark.”

As for that, Bill said, rather unexpectedly, anything they did now was a leap. They leaped at one person and then at another; at one possibility and then at another. The trouble, he said, was not that Pam was leaping. It was that she was leaping without a target.

“Nevertheless,” Pam said, “you can't simply ignore the letter. It has to be explained. I merely want to go along, and I think we ought to go today. And all I want, really, is to find out how old she is. If she's the wrong age, the whole thing goes out the window.”

Mullins spoke suddenly.

“There's always the inspector, Loot,” he said. “Ain't there?”

“Right,” Bill said. “There's always the inspector, Pam.”

“The trouble with the inspector,” Pam said, “one of the troubles, is that he thinks murder is a private affair. It isn't. I'm a citizen and she worked for Jerry.”

Bill smiled. He said he hadn't forgotten that. He said he supposed they could use it again, if necessary.

“How is Inspector O'Malley?” Pam wanted to know. “Does he still think it was suicide?”

Weigand said the inspector was weakening. He said the inspector was ready now to settle for murder, if he could have Philip Spencer for murderer.

“I like Spencer,” Mullins said. “It's sorta reasonable.”

Bill Weigand said he didn't dislike Spencer. He said it was too early to like anybody.

“How about the girl?” Jerry said. “The maid. What was her name?”

Weigand told him it was Florence Adams. He said they hadn't heard anything about her.

“Run out powder,” Mullins said, fishing out a half slice of orange and munching it ruminatively. “Or she could of known too much.”

“She could of,” Bill agreed. “She probably did—does. She'll probably turn up.”

Hugo came and said their table was ready, and that he was sorry. He said things ought to get better now, with the war over. They went back through the crowded restaurant to the table. Things were getting better, Pam said. Consider butter.

They considered butter, and other things. After they had finished and were standing up, Pam North looked at Bill and raised her arched eyebrows. Bill smiled.

“Right,” he said. “As you say, the letter has to be explained.”

6

W
EDNESDAY
, 1:30
P
.
M
.
TO
1:33
P
.
M
.

We use kinder words about ourselves than others use; we do not see or hear about ourselves what others see. Florence Adams could have read the police description of herself and, with the name omitted, found that it stirred no faintest recollection of anyone she had ever seen. Her skin was rather dark, and she thought of it as “olive”; her hair was black, surely, but the word “black” alone did not describe it—it would have been, had been, a word which, used alone, was clearly inadequate for the purpose. She had read, in a magazine story, of a heroine whose hair was “lustrous black” and, although Florence Adams could not readily have told how a lustrous thing would look, she thought afterward of her own hair as like the heroine's in the book. Magazines were books to Florence Adams, as they were, at the other extreme, to magazine editors.

Florence Adams was a slight, not tall, girl—perhaps
petite
was the word—with lustrous black hair and an olive complexion. She wore a close-fitting, two-piece dress of autumn-leaf brown, and her black eyes, also, were more than merely black. There was depth to them—as, indeed, there had been to the eyes of her heroine in the book. She almost never wore glasses, since she wore glasses only when she read. No one would have thought of her as myopic; she never thought of herself as myopic, never having heard the word. That was—that partly was—Florence Adams to Florence Adams. If she would not have recognized herself from the police description, the police surely would not have recognized her from her own.

Nobody else had recognized Florence from the police description by one o'clock Wednesday afternoon. A great many people had seen her, or could have seen her. Actually, it is improbable that many did see her—see her clearly enough, consciously enough, to know that her complexion was sallow-olive, her hair black, her dress a rather muddy brown; that she was—or would be if she lived long enough—rather top-heavy; that she did not use color on her fingernails, although this last was faintly noteworthy. Those who saw her at all saw a small young woman of no particular appearance in clothes of no particular color, and would have assumed—if they had troubled—that she was going nowhere in particular. In this last, at any rate, they would have been wrong.

Florence had gone to a movie Tuesday night and had sat, obediently, through both features. She had never left a motion picture theater in her life without seeing all of both pictures; it would never have occurred to her that this was possible. She had therefore been on upper Broadway at about midnight and had bought a copy of
The Daily News
. She had gone into an all-night drugstore to read it and have a cup of coffee; she had got to the story of Miss Gipson's death after she had finished the comics and while she was looking idly at the rest of the paper, chiefly at the pictures. The name had leaped out at her and she had sat a moment staring at it. Then she had gone home, almost running. Because then she was frightened and wanted familiar walls around her.

But when she stopped to think—when she stopped to look around, anxiously, at the familiar walls—they did not offer the sanctuary they had promised. It was, this small room, the first place they would come. She was cold, suddenly, although the night was warm; involuntarily she shivered. They would come; at any moment they would come. And with her fear there was a sharp, violent anger. Words of hate, of description, came to her mind which she could not have, if she had been able to analyze—if she had had the habit of analysis—remembered she had ever heard. Certainly she had never used them.

So it was not an easy way of earning a hundred dollars, enough for a new winter coat and to spare. It was a way to get the police after her; to get herself put in prison. Or—her mind balked at the alternative. But her mind could not shake off the alternative. They killed people who killed other people—who even helped kill other people. She trembled; she listened with a kind of terrified intensity. And then she knew she had to get away.

She had not many clothes to pack in an old suitcase, but there were too many when she added the coat. She did not need the coat, so she left it hanging in the room. She tried to take everything; tried to obliterate all trace of herself in the room, but she did not think of the opened newspaper as a trace. She turned off the light after she had finished packing and opened the door to the hall fearfully and looked up and down the corridor. There were only dim lights in the hall and there was no one to see her, yet as she went she walked close to the wall and made herself small. There was something protective about a wall.

It was desperately hard to step out into the street, and for a moment she hesitated, shrinking, in the doorway. She must not look as if she were frightened, as if she were running away. But, lugging her suitcase up the street toward Broadway, looking around her at a world which always—because she did not need to wear glasses, really, unless she was reading—was half-shrouded in fog, she looked only like a frightened girl running away. She looked younger than she had for a good many years; the shell which had protected her, as a shell might protect some small helpless animal, had dissolved. Any perceptive person would have noticed this, and a policeman might have. But she did not see any policeman on her way to the subway at 110th Street, and none saw her.

The subway was familiar. Every day, at a little after nine in the morning, she entered at this place and rode down to the Sheridan Square station, from which she could walk to the Holborn Annex. She rode on the local, if that came first, to Ninety-sixth Street. If she were lucky, and an express came first, she rode straight through. Otherwise she changed at Ninety-sixth. She rode the express to Fourteenth Street and changed to the local and rode one stop to Sheridan Square. It was familiar.

Now she had to wait for a train longer than in the mornings, but even as she waited the sense of familiarity grew. There was protection here, on the almost empty platform, which her room had not offered. People looked at her incuriously; she had the consciousness of their glances passing over her and not hesitating. She did not put the confidence this gave her into words, but she knew that there could not be anything so changed about her. She even looked at herself in the mirror of one of the machines which vended chewing gum and, after she had looked, straightened her hat and powdered her nose. She was much calmer—much less frightened—when the train came and she entered it, and was engulfed by the familiar, reassuring, metallic roar of its progress through the tunnel.