A Pinch of Poison (19 page)

“It's a hell of a note, Lieutenant,” he said. “But what could I do? There's no cover out front; unless I was going to go in and sit with the old dame, I had to hang out across the street. And how was I to cover the back door?”

“All right, Sullivan,” Weigand said. “Nobody's blaming you. What happened?”

Sullivan had been, he said, standing across the street, where the shadow was deepest. He was standing so that he could look along the side of the house, and command a section of the back yard. There was only one light in the house—a dim one from one of the side windows, near the rear. He was keeping an eye on it, and whatever else was going, when he heard the dog bark. He wondered about that and started across the street and stopped. The dog's barking was something to wonder about, but nothing to act on. It was about a minute—perhaps two minutes—later that he heard the sound of three shots, close together. Then he moved.

He ran along the side of the house, but couldn't run full out because of the roughness of the ground and an undergrowth of weeds and bushes. By the time he got around to the back door, he heard somebody running a good way off. But he looked for Mrs. Halstead, first, when he saw that the back door was partly open. He found her when he tried to open the door a little more; she was lying against it. He went around to the side and in through a window so as not to disturb the body.

“And I didn't know she was dead,” he said. “I didn't want to push her around if she wasn't. It makes a difference, lots of times.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “I don't know what more you could have done. But by the time you found out about her, the murderer had got away. You didn't hear any more running?”

“That's it,” Sullivan said. “But there's only one of me, Lieutenant.”

Weigand nodded, abstractedly.

“What else do we know?” he asked Kenman. Kenman knelt again by the body. “Feel this,” he said. “It isn't blood.”

He directed Weigand's hand to the hem of the long, black skirt. It was wet. Moving his hand, Weigand found it was wet all along.

“Just water,” Kenman said. “The shoes are wet, too. She'd been out somewhere just before—during the rain or just after it.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “How about a coat—a raincoat? Or an umbrella?”

The boys had been looking, Kenman said. He called to one of them.

“That's right,” the detective said. “We just found it, hanging up in the bathroom. An umbrella, that is. No coat.”

“Wet?” Weigand asked.

“Yeh,” the detective said. “Pretty well soaked.”

“Right,” Weigand said. To Kenman he said, “Maybe it'll help, eventually. Anything else?”

“Well,” Kenman said, “she'd eaten dinner before she went out. Stacked the dishes but not washed them. Had beans, apparently.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “We'll tell the M.E. Give him something to look for. And—”

There wasn't, Kenman said, much else yet. It was an odd house; about half of it apparently wasn't in use, and hadn't been for years. Mrs. Halstead seemed to have lived in a couple of rooms downstairs and the kitchen. There was another room upstairs which looked more habitable than the others, and more recently used. Nothing was very clean, including the clothes of Mrs. Halstead which filled a closet opening off the central hall. That was about all—

“Here's something, Lieutenant,” a new voice said. A small, thickset detective appeared with it.

“You Lieutenant Weigand?” he said, addressing the Homicide Bureau man. Weigand nodded. “Then the old dame was writing you a letter,” the thickset detective said. “Stuffed down by the cushion in that old chair of hers. We just dug it out.”

He handed Weigand a sheet of paper. It was crumpled, and Weigand straightened it out. Kenman put the beam of his flashlight on it and Weigand read:

“Lieutenant Weigand: I have been thinking things over since your intrusion today and have also made a discovery about Michael's father which I think will in—”

The letter broke off.

“So then,” Weigand said, “the murderer knocked at the door.”

Kenman looked at him.

“Yeh,” he said. “You make it sound like a book title, but that's probably the way it was.”

“‘In—'” Weigand quoted. “‘Interest you,' probably.” He stared at the letter. “Damn!” he said. “Just when she was going to spill it. This guy annoys me, Kenman.”

“He is sort of annoying,” Kenman admitted. “What's the routine?”

“Oh,” Weigand said, “turn the boys loose, of course. I don't suppose the fingerprint boys will get much. Oh, by the way, they'll probably get mine—I was here today. Have them check at Headquarters before they start baying, will you?” He looked around the room. “The pictures will be pretty, won't they?” he said. “They ought to get the cat there, crouching by the body. The papers would love 'em.”

“Sure,” said Kenman. “They'd be pretty.”

“We'll have to try to find out where she'd been,” Weigand said. “It may not mean a thing—probably she was just out after a quarter-pound of tea, or something. And it may mean the hell of a lot.”

“Yes,” Kenman said. “I'll get the boys on it. Anything else special, since it's your case?”

Weigand thought and shook his head.

“Just the ordinary,” he said. “We'll find out everything we can, and save the bullets and take the prints. I'd like reports downtown, of course. And if the boys in the back yard run across a murderer in the bushes they might bring him along.”

“Yeh,” Kenman said. “I'll remind them. You know who did it?”

Weigand looked at him.

“I wouldn't say know who, by a long shot,” he said. “I've got a hunch, but I can't break it. I can guess why.”

“She knew something,” Kenman said. It was more statement than interrogation. Weigand nodded.

“Right,” he said. “I'd say she knew something. And that she was going to spill it. And now where do you suppose Mullins is?”

They sought Mullins and found him in the back yard, looking gloomily at some footprints etched smudgily on a small expanse of weedless earth.

“Tennis shoes,” Mullins said darkly, when they found him. “Old tennis shoes. No nice identifying marks or anything.” He looked at the lieutenant, a little resentfully. “You and I sure get the screwy ones, Loot,” he said. “And no breaks.”

They left Kenman to carry on with the routine. There wasn't, Weigand told Mullins, anything more for them at the house, for the moment anyway. They swung away from the curb and headed toward the Parkway. They were about to enter it when Weigand stopped, sat for a moment with his hands resting idly on the wheel, and then backed the Buick away from the Parkway and swung it to face north again.

“While we're up here,” he said, “we may as well look in on the Grahams. Find out how the lady is. That would be polite, wouldn't it, Mullins?”

“Listen, Loot—” Mullins said.

“She was all right this afternoon,” Weigand told him. “A little nervous and strained, maybe, but all right. You know, Mullins, she didn't look to me like a woman who was getting ready to collapse. She didn't look that way at all.”

The Graham house blazed with light; even the porch was flooded.

“Looks like a party,” Mullins said as they drew up. “I thought she was sick.”

So, Weigand said, had he. They parked and Weigand led the way to the door. He had barely touched the bell when the door swung open. The man who faced him was about medium height and thin, but it was, Weigand guessed, the thinness of the wiry. The man's light hair, graying at the temples, was disordered as if excited hands had been running through it. In the instant before he spoke, Weigand felt that eagerness drained out of the man.

“Oh,” he said flatly. “Who are you? What do you want?”

Weigand identified himself.

“I came to ask about Mrs. Graham,” he said. “I was up here, anyway. I was talking to her this afternoon and—”

“Were you?” the man said, bitterly. “So you were talking to her this afternoon, Lieutenant? And what did you say to her, I'd like to know?”

Weigand shook his head.

“I don't get it,” he said. “I just asked her some routine questions. Why?”

“Because,” the man said angrily, “she's gone! You scared her somehow and she's run away, or—or something's happened to her. Did you scare her about the boy?”

“No,” said Weigand. “I didn't scare her about anything, Mr. Graham.”

The man stared at him and appeared to accept the statement.

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm—well, it's got me. She was all right this morning. This afternoon the nurse who takes care of my father called and said that Mrs. Graham was hysterical. I came home at once and she'd gone—just like that—gone. The nurse said she had seemed quieter after a few minutes and had been willing to lie down. The nurse had to go back to Father then, and didn't know anything more. But apparently Margaret just got up and—and went away. When I came home she wasn't here.”

“Perhaps,” Weigand suggested, “she's just gone to see a friend or—”

“And stayed away more than four hours?” Graham said. “When she knew the nurse had telephoned me and that I was coming home? You'll have to do better than that, Lieutenant.” He stared at Weigand and Mullins. “Oh, come on in,” he said. “I was going to call somebody anyway—get the police on it.”

Weigand and Mullins went in.

“I thought maybe she'd gone to see somebody,” Graham said. “I thought maybe she was nervous and upset about something and couldn't stand to stay here alone. And when she didn't come back I telephoned a lot of people. And then—well, it was crazy, but I'm pretty near crazy about it anyway—I went out and looked for her. I thought—God knows what I thought. That she had been going some place and that something had—happened to her. It's lonely up here. I—I looked in all the loneliest places.”

He pressed his temples with the palms of his hands.
“Where is she?”
he demanded.
“What's happened to her?”
He seemed himself to be on the verge of hysterics.

“Take it easy,” Weigand told him. “Probably—probably it's nothing. The chances are she's all right and—”

“Why are they?” Graham broke in. His tone seemed desperate. “
You
don't know what's happened to her, do you?”

“Why, no,” Weigand said. “How should I know? But most people who disappear turn up all right, eventually. The chances are they will.” He looked at Graham. “I can't promise anything, of course. But we have ways of finding people. Do you want to make a report about her?”

“I don't care what I do,” Graham said. “I've got to find her.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Just take it as easy as you can. I'll get on to the Missing Persons Bureau and start things moving. Now she was—let's see—about how old?”

Dully, Graham described his wife. She was thirty-two, he said, and weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds; she was blond and had blue eyes and probably was wearing a pale blue silk dress and a white linen hat. He, helped by the nurse, had looked through his wife's clothes, and those things seemed to be missing. Weigand, at the telephone, turned the particulars over to the Missing Persons Bureau.

“There may be a hookup of some sort with the Winston case,” he told the lieutenant at the Bureau. “Give it what you've got, Paul.”

“They'll do all they can,” Weigand told Graham, turning back. “As fast as they can. There's nothing for you to do but sit tight and stay by the telephone. The chances are she'll call up. There's no sense in your wading around in vacant lots.”

“I know,” Graham said. He seemed calmer now. “There never was. But I had to do something.”

Weigand said he could understand that. But now there would be good men working on it and—

“I'll tell you,” he said. “Maybe we can do something else. Not that I think anything will come of it, but it will relieve your mind. I'll get the precinct to send a couple of men to look around the neighborhood just on the chance—well, that she might have fainted, or something. Right?”

Graham nodded.

“It might help,” he said. “I wish you would.”

Weigand called the precinct and listened to the desk sergeant. He agreed that it was too bad; that already the precinct was using a lot of men to look for things he wanted found; that the precinct wasn't made of men. He said it was tough, but there it was. It needed to be done. The sergeant lapsed into mere grumpiness; finally he agreed that it would have to be done. Weigand hung up and turned to Graham.

“They'll put a couple of men on it,” he said. “It's their busy night.” He looked at Graham thoughtfully. “Mrs. Halstead was killed tonight,” he said. “You know who she is, don't you?”

“Halstead?” Graham repeated. “It seems to me—” He looked up suddenly, his interest appearing to quicken. “Wasn't she the woman who had Michael?” he asked.

Weigand nodded.

“Killed?” Graham said. “You mean, in an accident?”

“No,” said Weigand, “she was murdered.”

Graham looked at him, and his expression of worry and alarm deepened.

“What's happening, Lieutenant?” he said. “First Miss Winston and then Mrs. Halstead and—
Lieutenant, what about Margaret?
”

“Take it easy,” Weigand said. “There's nothing to show any connection. I don't think anybody is after your wife, Mr. Graham. Unless—”

“Unless what?” Graham said. Weigand paused.

“Well,” he said, at length, “I'm assuming that Mrs. Halstead was killed because she had some information which was dangerous to the person who killed Lois Winston. I don't know that's true, but I think it is. If Mrs. Graham had similar information she might be in similar danger. But apparently she hasn't.”