A Pinch of Poison (18 page)

The murderer dragged feet through wet, tall grass in the darkness, finding a way with feet and with the hand which did not carry death. Wet bushes slapped and distracted with their small, impotent annoyance. Water sloshed through shoes and garments clung, cold and impeding, around legs. The world dragged at the murderer, as if to hold death back. But death could not be held back; once you have killed you must, if it is needed, kill again. And now it was needed. The murderer's mind fixed on the need and clung there.

Long ago, the murderer thought, I did all this before—long ago, when I was twelve or so, all this happened over. That night it rained and I was lost and after a while it was like this. Then the world was too big and all the walls fell back and there was nothing I could reach. And everything was unreal then, and I stood off and saw myself and I could not get back into myself for a long time, until somebody brought a light. It is that way now, the murderer thought, and for a moment the murderer stood still, in tall, wet grass. The murderer saw this other person standing there, clutching death. That is myself, the murderer thought.

It was only for a moment and then the murderer went on. It had been dark for a long time, but that was the false darkness of the storm. The clouds were rolling off now and there were wet stars left behind, but now it was really dark, with the darkness of night.

“I can't see my hand before my face,” the murderer thought and held up the hand which clutched death. The murderer giggled softly because the thought was so irrelevant and inadequate and stale against the moment. “I can't see my hand before my face,” the murderer thought. “My hand before my face. My hand before my face.” The words became a rhythm and in the rhythm the murderer could forget the other little, futile things. The surface of the murderer's mind played with the words, over and over, and was occupied. The murderer forced through a low, uncared-for hedge and stopped. “My hand before my face, my hand before my face,” the murderer's mind said over and over.

There was a light in the house. It was a pale, yellow light and the murderer watched it for a moment, not moving. The light was blotted out a moment and then reappeared, as if someone had moved between the window and a lamp. In the darkness the murderer moved forward slowly, carefully. The weedy grass was not so tall, here, but still the murderer's feet sank into it, sank to soft, yielding ground.

“Footprints!” the murderer thought, and stopped. “I'm leaving footprints,” the murderer thought. Then, with a puzzled sigh, the murderer remembered that that thought had come before and been allowed for. The fear which had surged up for a moment, as if something vital had been forgotten until it was too late, ebbed away. “My hand before my face,” the murderer thought. “My hand before my face.”

The door of the house ought to be a little to the right of the window. They would be watching the house. For minutes the murderer had stood at the end of the street, in the darkness, and waited until there was dark movement near the house, just perceptible against the fading light in the sky to the west. That would be the watcher, the murderer had decided, and had moved backward cautiously in the shadow and gone down another street and then, very slowly and with a kind of desperate care, through a weed-grown lot. If they are smart, the murderer thought, they'll find out the way I came through the weeds. The murderer giggled, thinking how little good it would do them if they did.

It was, the murderer thought, moving with slow care toward the house, easier the other way. The white powder had looked so innocent in the little twist of paper; there was no terror in letting it slip from the paper into the glass. It was not like murder, the murderer thought—the mind would not accept a few grains of white powder in a glass as murder. You felt no particular responsibility for what happened; it was as if the white powder, in some fashion of its own, became the murderer. Between what you did, untwisting paper and letting powder spill, and the death which came afterward there was no connection that the emotions could compass. You knew you had killed, but you did not feel like a murderer. When you murdered you saw the other person's face near your own, and saw terror in it and then—you killed. You reached out a hand and there was death in it, and you killed.

It is real this way, the murderer thought, and there was a kind of savage eagerness in the thought. The other one who died had been an obstacle; you pressed a button and, at a great distance, the obstacle disappeared. But this one was an enemy and you would meet your enemy and see fear in the enemy's face and then your one hand would act. The murderer looked at the weapon. A knife would have been better; there was a kind of dreadful intimacy about killing with a knife. But it was too late to think of that, now.

Here was the door and the murderer raised a hand. It had come, now; now there was no waiting for it any longer. The murderer knocked.

A dog began barking shrilly inside. The murderer waited and the dog's bark died away.

“No!” the murderer thought. “She's got to be there!” The murderer knocked again.

There were slow, heavy steps moving toward the door. Then they stopped and the woman inside spoke.

“Who is it?” she said. “Go around to the front.”

“No,” the murderer said. “You know who it is. I've got to talk to you.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “So it's you. I wondered if you wouldn't come sneaking around. Wait a minute. You can talk to me, all right.”

The murderer heard the metallic clatter, subdued and small, as the chain was lifted inside. Now, the murderer thought. Now it has come. The door opened a little way and the woman stood in it.

“Well,” she said, “so it's you, all right, is it? I thought—”

There was no use letting her go on. It was now—now! The gun spoke three times.

It was not as the murderer had thought it would be. There had been no time for terror in the other face; it had merely been the old woman's face, with a kind of satisfaction in it, and then, in the instant before she fell, there had been nothing in the face at all—not even surprise. And then the woman was no longer standing at the door.

The murderer ran, now. Now the darkness was a friend, was safety. The wet grass and the wet bushes closed behind the murderer, like a concealing curtain; the murderer could feel the world thickening behind to protect. There was a kind of exultation in the murderer's mind. “I'm safe,” the murderer thought. “Now I'm safe!”

13

W
EDNESDAY

9:20
P.M.
TO
10:45
P.M.

When the telephone bell shrilled Weigand was nearest, and he scooped it up even as Mr. North nodded at him.

“Yes,” Weigand said. There was a pause. “Yes? Right, Sullivan.” There was another pause. Weigand's voice when he spoke again was not raised, but there was a new timbre in it. “Who got her?” He listened again. “No,” he said. “I suppose you couldn't. Are you sure she's dead? Where are you?” Pause. “Well, get on to the precinct. Tell them to get some men around the block—around several blocks, if they've got enough. How long has it been?” He listened. “It won't do any good, probably,” he said. “Tell the precinct it's our case and get them on it. Get the district squad on it. I'll be along. What?—Right!”

He was standing as he dropped the telephone back on its cradle.

“Mrs. Halstead has been shot,” he said. “She's dead.” He looked at the others; at Mullins, who was on his feet, too. “God knows I don't get it,” Weigand said. “Unless—” He stared unseeingly at Mr. North for a moment. He pulled himself out of it. “All right, Mullins,” he said. His voice was crisp and full of purpose. “We're going along.”

“Do you suppose it's the same one?” Mr. North said. His voice sounded alarmed. Weigand looked at him and saw him.

“I wouldn't know,” he said. “It looks like it, doesn't it?” He was reaching for the door when he spoke again. “I guess we'll have to wash out your kidnaping theory, Pam,” he said. He was through the door and halfway down the stairs. Mullins, however, stopped a minute with his hand on the knob.

“Goodnight,” Mullins said. “I'm—” He clutched for the correct words. “I'm sorry we have to bust off like this, Mrs. North. We had a swell time.” Mullins took one last look at a tantalus which contained rye. “As far as it went,” Mullins said, a little wistfully. Then he called, “O.K., Loot,” in answer to a muffled sound from below, and went heavily, but rapidly, down the stairs.

“Well,” Mrs. North said, looking after him. “That was sudden, wasn't it?”

“Very,” Mr. North agreed. “There's nothing like a murder to break up a party.”

Mrs. North said she was just thinking that.

“You know,” she said, “do you suppose it could be something we do—something wrong, I mean?—
All
our dinners seem to end like this nowadays. With murders.” Mrs. North looked perplexed. “Do you suppose,” she said, “it could be something about us?”

The side street in Riverdale, so deserted an hour earlier—so distant, in its eddy, from the city of New York—was busy enough now. Weigand wheeled the Buick diagonally to the curb, so that its headlights joined others in sweeping the rough, weed-grown yard; in glaring harshly on the old brick of the house itself. Green-and-white radio cars stood by the curb. Behind the house, visible and audible as Weigand stepped from the car, men moved with lights. Somebody said, “Here. Look at this!” and lights converged in a knot.

A light swung into Weigand's face as he walked up the path with the car lights behind him. “All right, buddy,” a heavily official voice started.

“Right,” Weigand said. “Weigand. Homicide.”

“Yes, sir,” the voice said, still official, but less heavy. “They're waiting for you inside, Lieutenant.”

He didn't need to be told that Mullins, moving in on the lieutenant's heels, was another cop. Even if Mullins had been alone, not sponsored by the Lieutenant, no other cop would ever have called him “buddy,” in the tone reserved for interfering laymen. Mullins was policeman to his shoe-leather, and looked it every inch. “Hiya,” he said to the uniformed man who had checked them. “Hiya,” the patrolman responded, giving the password.

They were already rigging floodlights in the old house, augmenting the smaller glow from forty-watt bulbs in bargain basement lamps. The cold, inquiring glare of the floods was merciless to the old house—to old rugs on the uneven floors, to faded paper curling away from the walls of the hall, to the holes in the covers of heavy, ancient chairs.

“Right,” Weigand said to a detective who told him, “right out there, Lieutenant.” “Right,” he said again, when another detective straightened up as he entered and said, “Weigand? Kenman. Bronx Homicide.

“Here she is,” Lieutenant Kenman said, needlessly. “Three of them. Right through her.”

Weigand knelt where Kenman had been kneeling. She had been a big, heavy woman, had Mrs. Halstead; a woman with an unrelenting face. The face had relented, now, but even in death it was formidable. She lay huddled, as if she had been half supported by something when she was shot, and had crumpled to the floor. Weigand swung a torch around, examining the old boards of the kitchen floor. Blood was dull on the boards. The beam of the torch swept under an old icebox, from which brown paint was flaking, and picked up two small, answering beams.

“What the hell?” said Weigand. He moved the light a little and, behind the tiny lights was a cowering cat. “Poor little devil,” Weigand thought. “There ought to be a dog. Anybody seen it?”

“We've got it in another room,” Kenman said. “It was a nuisance out there. It—it had been around after she was shot. Blood all over it.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “The M.E. been along?”

He hadn't, Kenman said. He had a ways to come. There wasn't, anyway, much they needed the M.E. to tell them.

“Somebody stood outside,” Kenman said. “There are some marks out there—thin, dried mud. She opened the door. Somebody plugged her three times with a .38.”

“So,” Weigand said. “You got a bullet?”

They had found a bullet only partly embedded in the wall behind Mrs. Halstead. It had gone through her, missing bone. It came from a .38 and was in good enough shape for comparative analysis when they had a gun to check. Weigand nodded.

“That'll help, when we get the gun,” he said. “Make your D.A. happy. Although I don't suppose he'll ever come in on it—New York County's got first crack, I should think. Right?”

It was, Kenman said, no skin off him. The district attorneys could fight it out.

“So you figure,” he said, “that this hooks up with the Winston kill?”

“Well,” Weigand said, “it wouldn't just happen that way, would it? I mean, it doesn't figure to. The people were hooked up, certainly. So one murderer probably does for both.”

Kenman nodded. He'd figured it that way, of course.

“Right,” Weigand said. “And where do we stand now? What's the precinct doing?”

The precinct had all the men it could spare on the job; so did the detective division which included the precinct. “They're cleaning up out back as well as they can in the dark,” Kenman said. “They've found where the killer went through, going away. He wasn't waiting for anything. They've found where he stood on the porch—apparently he persuaded the old girl to open the door for him. Then he plugged her, and got going. He must have gone fast, or your man would have picked him up.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Where is Sullivan?”

“Helping around somewhere,” Kenman said. “You want him?”

Weigand did. Sullivan was yelled for by a man whose voice barked in the night. Sullivan appeared, not looking very happy.