A Pinch of Poison (15 page)

“Are you?” Weigand said. “I wouldn't know.”

“And,” she said, “you wouldn't believe me if I said I wasn't. If I said I didn't give a damn about the money.”

“I don't know,” Weigand said. “I might, Miss Ormond. About being a tramp, that is. Everybody gives a damn about money.” He looked at her, and this time her eyes did not reject his look so blankly. “Suppose I say I wouldn't pick you for a tramp. Suppose you pretend I'm not trying to put anything over. Just to see how it works out.”

She studied him, this time. Then she nodded slowly.

“You don't seem so tough,” she admitted. “Maybe you really want to know things. I don't think I'm a tramp. Randall's money is swell—any money is swell. We'd like to have the money, all right.
We'd
like to have it. Not
I'd
like to have it.” She looked at him hard, leaning forward a little and searching his face. “Is that too deep for you, Lieutenant?” she said.

Weigand was patient.

“I can touch bottom,” he said. “I just want to know, Miss Ormond. You can see why—you're not missing things. What Randall might do if you were just digging some gold is one thing. What he might do if you and he were really together is another. You'll have to take my word for it that I just want to know.”

He paused.

“Or,” he said, “you don't have to take my word. Play it as you want to. I'll get along somehow.”

“All right,” Madge Ormond said. “I'll take a chance. I love the kid. So what does that make me?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. Sophistication can be very defensive when it is challenged.

“It makes it different,” Weigand said. He studied her face and then saw that her eyes were wet. Her smile was neat and exact and her face was smooth and lovely, but her eyes were wet. “Your mascara will run,” he warned her.

“Not it,” she said. “Guaranteed.” She said it as lightly as she could, but it wasn't very lightly. Slowly she began to nod her head and her lips trembled. “All right,” she said. “I'm not so tough. I love the kid. He loves me. He wouldn't do anything to hurt us.” She said it challengingly. “He's different underneath,” she said. “He's not the way he acted at all.”

“Isn't he?” Weigand said. He said it gently. He didn't, he found, think Madge Ormond had gone into her act.

“We both started out being tough,” she said. “I'll give you that. He was money in the bank to me and I was—well, I'll give you one guess—to him. And then—then it got different. Not all at once, or anything. Just after awhile it was different. And then we decided to get married. But we still didn't see any reason why he shouldn't have his money; we wouldn't be cheating anybody else. So we kept it secret.”

“Where did you get married?” he asked.

“Right here,” she said. “Only—well, Madge Ormond is just the name I use. I'm—” she hesitated. “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “My name is Stella Ormk.”

“What?” said Weigand.

She laughed, a little hysterically.

“Ormk,” she said. “Believe it or not, Ormk.”

“I've got to believe it,” Weigand said, awed. “It would have to be true.”

He thought a moment.

“It was only six weeks ago?” he said. “That might be important. Remember, I can look it up.”

“Yes,” she said, “six weeks.” She didn't ask why it might be important.

“And,” he said, “how long before that had you been—going together?”

“About two years.”

“Not”—he figured quickly—“nearer four years?”

“Two years,” she said. “Why?”

He shook his head at her. A theory was growing in his head as he shook it.

“Before that,” he said, “did he see a lot of some girl—some girl his father found out about? Some girl, maybe, who really was a tramp?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I suppose so. We didn't talk about it.”

“Do you know,” Weigand said, bluntly, “whether he and this other girl ever had a child?”

She stared at him, her eyes widening.

“I don't get it,” she said. “He was just a kid—what do you mean?”

He wasn't, Weigand reminded her, so much of a kid as all that. Four years ago he was nineteen. Plenty old enough to get into trouble.

“Suppose that had happened,” Weigand said. “And it came out. He wouldn't get his money, would he?”

It was a stab in the dark, and he couldn't tell what it hit. She stared at him.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said. There was no animus he could detect. “It was just if he married, I think.”

Weigand puzzled over it. He didn't know, either. But it was worth trying.

“Suppose,” he said, “that there is something in the will which provides that Randall doesn't get his money if he is married before he is twenty-five
or
if he is seriously involved with a woman before he is twenty-five. And suppose somebody—his sister, maybe—stumbled by accident onto the fact that he had had a son when he was a kid of nineteen.” He watched her face. If she and Randall were really close, and there was anything in his theory, she might know—she might know a lot. He waited.

“It wasn't that way,” she said. Her eyes were very wide in a pale face. “You can't do that to Buddy!”

“I'm not trying to do anything to Buddy,” he told her. “I'm trying to find out what you know. Maybe it wasn't in the will. But maybe Lois did find out about the child and was going to use what she had found out to influence her mother, so that she wouldn't agree to Buddy's marriage with you—and wouldn't be reasonable if she found out that you were already married. How does that sound?”

“I tell you it wasn't that way,” she said. “I don't know where you get all this stuff about a child. Buddy didn't do anything to his sister—he couldn't.” There was terrible anxiety in her face. “You believed me a while ago,” she said. “You've got to believe me now—he couldn't! We didn't want to hurt anybody; we wouldn't ever have hurt anybody. We just wanted to be together, and we didn't see why he couldn't have his money. And so he wanted to talk to Lois.”

She spoke eagerly, with a kind of desperate intensity. She believes that, Weigand told himself. I'm almost sure she believes it.

“That's why he went to her table,” the girl went on. There was no effort, now, to maintain a pose. She seemed younger and, Weigand thought, very frightened.

“He just went over to leave a note,” she went on. “About talking to her later—he was going to tell her everything about us. The way it really was. He said he could make her understand—he said she just didn't understand how it was, because she kept remembering how he had been when he was younger, but that he could make her see. ‘She's all right, really, Sis is,' he said to me. ‘She'll be for us when she gets the picture.'”

Her eyes were anxious as they sought his.

“Everything was going to be all right,” she said. “We both believed it was—we were sure. Don't you see we wouldn't have gained if anything happened to Lois—that we just, wanted to explain things to her, so she would tell her mother how Buddy and I really felt. Don't you see that?”

“I don't know,” Weigand said. “I think you believe it, Miss Ormond. I wondered about that, but now I think you believe it. But I don't know, really.”

Her arm went out along the arm of the chair, and her head dropped on it. It was a defeated, touching movement.

“I'm sorry,” Weigand said. “But you'll see how it is yourself when you think it over. You're just going on what your husband told you. I can't promise anything.”

The blond head turned on the arm.

“Leave me alone,” she said. “Can't you leave me alone?”

Weigand turned away. Then he stopped.

“I'm not trying to get anything on anybody, Miss Ormond,” he said. “Nothing that isn't already there. If Buddy's in the clear I can't hurt him. You know that.”

“All right,” she said, her voice muffled and dull. “I have to believe you. But I'm afraid. I'm so afraid!”

There wasn't anything to say. Weigand turned and walked toward the door. Behind him he heard Madge Ormond sobbing. It's a hell of a racket, Weigand told himself, gloomily. He was tired of seeing people. He would go down to Headquarters and look at some papers. Papers didn't stir you up. It was easy to be a cop when you could do it on paper.

10

W
EDNESDAY

3:20
P.M.
TO
5:30
P.M.

He was rather relieved than otherwise when, getting a physician on the telephone at the Ashley apartment, he was informed flatly that Mrs. Ashley was still in no condition to be interviewed. He drove downtown through the heat. It would storm later, he thought. Looking down a side street as he drove south he could see heavy storm-heads banking up in the west. At Headquarters there was word to see Inspector O'Malley. O'Malley wanted action, he said.

“Where's this Ashley guy?” he wanted to know. Weigand told him. The Ashley guy had gone out early in the afternoon to see an undertaker. Now he was back at the apartment again, presumably holding his mother's hand. David McIntosh had gone back to the offices from which he administered his affairs—the McIntosh estate. Then he had gone to the Harvard Club. Not being a Harvard man, the detective associated with David McIntosh had loitered in Forty-fourth street.

“Ashley,” O'Malley said, positively. “Ashley's the guy. What are we waiting for?”

They were waiting for evidence, Weigand told him, with all proper politeness. Meanwhile—

“Meanwhile,” O'Malley said, “you waste time talking to a lot of people who don't figure.” He banged his desk. “If I wasn't nailed down here I'd do it myself,” he said. “You young guys—!”

Weigand waited until Inspector O'Malley blew over. He was not particularly alarmed by the chance that O'Malley might leave his desk. O'Malley liked a place to put his feet.

O'Malley blew over. Weigand went back to his desk and found reports awaiting him. Two of the three men who had recently purchased atropine sulphate to use in making eyewash were, it developed, busily making eyewash. The third had not been located. At the address he gave, nobody had ever heard of him. Weigand brooded over this.

“There's our guy, Loot,” Mullins said. “All we have to do is round him up.”

“Is it?” Weigand said. “That's nice, Mullins. What does he look like?”

“Well,” Mullins said, “we had a little trouble there. He's a short, fat guy about five feet, ten inches and weighing around a hundred and sixty pounds, and he's either got black hair or he's bald. A couple or three guys saw him, which makes it tough.”

“Well,” Weigand said, “let me know when you round him up, won't you, Mullins?”

“Listen, Loot,” Mullins said, aggrieved. Weigand smiled at him.

“Right,” Weigand said. “No doubt he is our man. It will be a help to have these couple or three guys look him over—when we catch him. The D. A.'ll like that. But I think we're going to catch him from the other end.”

Mullins pondered it and said, “Yeah.”

“It's screwy again, ain't it, Loot?” he said. “You think it was this guy, Ashley?”

Weigand shrugged.

“Well,” Mullins said, reasonably, “who else we got? This guy McIntosh?”

“Why not?” said Weigand. “On the other hand, why? He wanted to marry the girl, and the only quarrel he seems to have had was because she wouldn't marry him fast enough and wanted to keep on working. So he kills her? Why?”

Mullins said he wouldn't know. Still, this McIntosh guy was there.

Precisely, Weigand agreed. And if he had any reason, he was a good bet. There was, already, something screwy about the reservation angle. Mullins nodded, approvingly. He thought the Loot had something there, all right. On the other hand, there was Mrs. Halstead to be considered. She, alone among the people they had run into, admitted animus toward Lois Winston. And she was at the roof.

“Yeh?” Mullins said. “How come?”

Weigand told him. Mullins brightened. Then his face fell.

“She don't sound like the kind of dame who would be dancing much, Loot,” he said. “So why pass the table?”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Things seem to cancel out.”

“How about Mrs. Graham?” Mullins said. “Does she fit in anywhere?”

Weigand shook his head. There was nothing to indicate it. She denied, by implication, having been at the roof; she professed to have liked Miss Winston, and the smooth progress of the placement proceedings supported her contention, so far as it applied. If she had any special interest, it was to keep Miss Winston alive until the placement was completed. Mullins nodded. The same, Weigand said, seemed to apply to Mrs. Graham's husband, except that they didn't know where he was that night.

“He was out,” Weigand said. “A business conference—maybe.”

Weigand sighed. Graham would have to be interviewed. He looked at Mullins speculatively, and an expression of cheer crossed his face.

“Listen, Loot,” Mullins said, quickly.

“Yes,” Weigand said. “That's what we'll do. You pop along and see what Mr. John Graham was doing last night. We might want to know some time.”

“Listen, Loot,” Mullins said. “He ain't even in it. And it's hot as—”

Gravely, as a lecturer on police practice, Weigand told Mullins about routine and thoroughness. One should, he pointed out, leave no stone unturned, and no grass growing under foot. One should take the stitch in time that saved nine and watch the pennies so that the pounds would take care of themselves. One should—

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “I'll go see Graham. You got me, Loot.”