A Pinch of Poison (28 page)

“And now?” Dorian said. Her voice was anxious. “Does she get him? To keep?”

Weigand shook his head, slowly.

“I wouldn't know,” he said. “But, for what it's worth, I should think so. You see, he's her own child. She won't have to prove that; we'll prove it for her, when Graham goes to trial. And unless somebody presses the issue, and the court decides she isn't a fit parent—well, I should think the child would stay with her. Wouldn't you, Pam?”

Pam nodded.

“I don't see how it could be any other way,” she said. “It's—it's something nice that has come out of it, anyway.”

Nobody said anything. Martha finished setting the table. Mr. North stared at her, abstractedly. He was obviously thinking it over. Then he looked rather puzzled.

“Listen,” he said, “wasn't there a suspicious man who
had
bought atropine sulphate that day? What about him?”

Weigand shook his head.

“There,” he said, “you've got me. We haven't found him; we don't figure to. For all I know, he may be another murderer, laying in his stock of poison. For all I know, he may be dropping it in a glass somewhere at this very—”

The telephone shrilled across his words. Everybody jumped and Mrs. North said anxiously, “Oh dear!” Mr. North picked the telephone up, after a second of looking at it with deep suspicion.

“Yes?” he said. “What? Who?” There was a little pause. “No,” Mr. North said. He listened a moment longer, said “No” again and put the telephone back in its cradle.

“What was it?” Mrs. North inquired. There was excitement in her voice. Mr. North looked at her and smiled gently.

“A wrong number, Pam,” he said. “Just a wrong number. Not another murder.”

Pam said, “Oh,” and sighed. It could be taken for a sigh of relief, of course. Mr. North decided he would take it for a sigh of relief. If it were anything else, there was nothing he could do about it. Pam would merely have to learn that she couldn't have a murder every night, with dinner. Not even if she did know a detective and—Mr. North looked across the room at Dorian and Bill—a lady who was, apparently, going to be a detective's wife.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries

I

T
UESDAY
, O
CTOBER 28—2:20 P.M. TO 3:10 P.M.

This time, they assured each other, nothing was going to intervene. They agreed to this and nodded confidence over their coffee cups, with the gravity of children, and were for their purposes quite alone in the un-childlike atmosphere of Club 21.

“Absolutely nothing, this time,” William Weigand promised himself and her. “Right?”

“Right,” Dorian said. “Exactly right.”

They nodded again.

“And so,” Weigand said, “are we waiting for something?”

Dorian Hunt said she couldn't think what.

“Approved and ready,” she said. “That's what we are. Approved for matrimony by the Empire State.”

She finished her coffee and put the cup down and looked, turning a little to face him, at Weigand on the seat beside her.

“And who are we,” she wanted to know, “to disappoint the Empire State?”

“And ourselves,” Weigand said. “Do we want brandies or something?”

Dorian thought they didn't. She said she had no use for people who had to get drunk to get married. She said that Bill would have to marry her cold sober.

“Any time,” Bill said, firmly. “Now.”

“We'll go find a little minister,” Dorian said. “A very quiet little minister.”

Bill said, “Right.”

“Only,” he said, “don't you have to find a little dressmaker and a little milliner first? I thought that was a rule.”

Dorian didn't say anything for a moment. She looked at Bill through eyes which always seemed to him to have a glint of green in them, and which now looked darker than they usually did. That might, he thought, be the lighting in the upstairs room at “21.” For a moment they looked at each other, slowly, with a kind of care.

“We are right, aren't we, Bill?” Dorian said. Her voice was grave; the question was a real question.

“Yes,” Bill said. “For a long time, now. Didn't you know?”

She smiled a little then, quickly.

“Whose fault was it that it was such a long time?” she wanted to know.

“Well,” he said, “for a good while, yours. All that stuff about marrying a cop. And then, I'll grant you—”

“Then,” she said, “it was you being a cop, and too busy. What with men in cement. And men without teeth in condemned houses. And such charming incidents.”

Bill would, he realized, have risen to that not so long ago; have answered, worried and anxious, and tried to make her see that something had to be done about men who killed other men and, for reasons which rather slowly became apparent, pulled out all their teeth; about men who encased their fellows in cement, and lowered them into rivers. Lieutenant William Weigand of the Homicide Bureau had often argued such matters with Dorian Hunt since that first day, which came so quickly after their first meeting, when they had realized that they were going to have to explain themselves rather fully to each other.

The fact that Weigand was Lieut. Weigand of the police, and that it was his primary duty to pursue, had been the one thing most difficult to explain to Dorian. At first she had said only “why?” and then, which was even more difficult, “why
you
?” It had taken time to explain that last, and a good many words, and in the end, Weigand suspected, it was not really the words that had done it. Never, he somewhat suspected, had Dorian come to approve his occupation, because she felt strongly, and with a personal bias, on the subject of hunters. His profession had become, in the end, merely a somewhat unfortunate attribute of William Weigand, and Dorian had decided to overlook it. After that, she seemed quite light-hearted about it, and even interested in pursuit as an exercise in logic. But Weigand did not suppose that she had changed essentially on the matter, and, since he was logical and wanted everything thrashed out fully, this sometimes puzzled him. He looked at her now and decided it was not an important puzzlement.

“Well,” he said, “I'm off today, if nothing breaks. So why not today? Why not”—he looked at his watch—“three o'clock at some small, and convenient, clergyman's? The Little Church?”

“No,” Dorian said, firmly. “Not the Little Church. Just some little preacher's, where nobody's ever gone before—a
new
little minister's, without any tradition.”

“Right!” Weigand said, and raised eyebrows at a waiter. He looked at the check, managed not to wince, and laid bills on the tray. The waiter pulled out the table and they wriggled forth and Weigand held Dorian's fitted, furless gray coat. It looked military, he thought, and said “Damn” under his breath. Dorian's eyebrows went up.

“Things,” he said. “Your coat looks like part of a uniform.”

Her eyes darkened again and she waited until he came beside her. Then she took his arm, suddenly, almost angrily. It was not like Dorian, who seldom took arms.

“Come on,” she said. “We've got to hurry, Bill. We've got to hurry—so
fast!
They're taking all our time away, Bill.”

Urgency went with them down the stairs. Bill was abrupt, hurried, as he collected hat and coat. He was quick and casual with the doorman who opened the door of his car—parked prominently and conveniently, as became the car of a police lieutenant. Inside the car his fingers moved automatically, hurriedly. The radio switch clicked in response to one familiar gesture; the fingers of the other hand twisted the key in the ignition lock. The motor took hold and the radio said, harshly, indifferently:

“—call your office.”

“Bill—” Dorian said. Unconsciously he held up his hand, quieting her as he listened.

“Car 8 call your office,” the radio said. “That is all.”

It was enough.

“Damn!” Weigand said, not under his breath. “Damn it to hell!”

“Oh—Bill!” Dorian said. “
Again
?”

The motor died as Weigand cut the switch.

“Maybe it's nothing,” he said. He didn't believe it. It was one of those things—when the car radio spoke metallically; when the telephone demanded angrily in the middle of the night; when a police messenger appeared suddenly at his desk, it was always one of those things. A man with his teeth out. A man in cement. One of those things. People, Weigand thought angrily, picked the damnedest times to murder.

“Maybe it's nothing,” he repeated. “I'm supposed to be off today. But I'll have to see.”

“Of course,” Dorian said, in a small voice. “You'll have to see. Oh, Bill—why don't you sell ribbons?”

“Nobody buys ribbons any more,” he said, opening the door. “Didn't you know about ribbon clerks, Dor? Technological unemployment—dreadful thing.”

He was out, and leaned back in.

“We'll hope,” he said. “You wait and hope.”

But it was no use hoping. Weigand turned away from the telephone in “21” knowing that. It was murder again, and Bill cursed it. But there was excitement, still, in a new case starting, and excitement ran under his disappointment. And then, half pleased and half perturbed, he contemplated the message he had just received, relayed, as to instructions, from Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley and, as to information, from Detective Sergeant Aloysius Clarence Mullins.

The instructions were simple. There was a man dead in a seat in the West 45th Street Theatre, which was against regulations. Lieutenant (Acting Captain) Weigand to investigate and report. The information, added with a touch of amusement in the voice by the patrolman on telephone duty, amplified by one sentence, quoting Mullins:

“Tell the Loot the Norths is here.”

To that, Weigand had said, simply, “My God!”

He repeated the gist of it to Dorian. It wasn't nothing; it was a case.

“And,” he said, “Jerry and Pam seem to be in it.”

“
Again?
” said Dorian.

“I know,” Weigand said, “it's peculiar. And what do we do with you?”

“We don't get married?” Dorian said. “There isn't going to be any little preacher?”

“I know,” Weigand said. “But there's a man dead. We'll fix that, and
then
the little preacher.” He looked at Dorian. “Damn,” he said, “it's a note, Dor.”

Dorian admitted, a little drily, that it was inconvenient. She said she had had her afternoon all planned.

“This is leaving me at loose ends,” she explained. “You should never leave a fiancée at loose ends, Bill. Didn't you know? So I think I'll just go along.”

“But—” Weigand began, getting into the car.

“If the Norths can, I can,” Dorian said, making movements of not getting out.

“But—” said Weigand, starting the motor.

“Of course,” Dorian said, “our other plan was better. But you would be a detective, and whither thou goest—”

“That,” Weigand said, “was said by one woman to another woman. Which nobody seems to remember.”

He turned on the siren, and cars scattered like alarmed chickens before a hawk's dive. Cars stopped at Fifth Avenue by the lights surged ahead in answer to commanding whistles and a traffic patrolman's strangely indignant gestures. Weigand's Buick, wailing, turned south on Fifth, and civilian cars hugged the curb obediently.

Dorian grabbed the door handle as the car swerved off Fifth into Forty-fifth and sent more traffic scattering. She gasped as the Buick swerved left and right again to avoid a grinding truck. She shouted something, and Bill leaned toward her.

“—stay dead—” he heard, and said, “What?”

“He'll stay dead,” Dorian shouted. “You don't have to—”

“Custom,” Weigand shouted back. “Cops always do. Regulations.”

They were beyond Broadway when Weigand flicked the siren off and put the brakes on. For a moment the change in sound was one rather of pitch than volume, as the tires shrieked on the pavement. Then the Buick nosed in beside a police radio car which was one of a covey of radio cars. The Homicide Squad car was against the curb in front of a theatre entrance. The marquee of the theatre had a title spelled out in light bulbs, with a word preceding it. The bulbs spelled out:

“Coming: TWO IN THE BUSH.”

There was a crowd, held back by patrolmen, so that the sidewalk immediately in front of the theatre was clear except for three lean men with cards in the bands of their hats. They saw the Lieutenant and started for him. Weigand waved at them.

They advanced with modified eagerness, and Weigand shook his head.

“Later,” he said. “I don't know myself.”

Dorian held on to Bill and the reporters looked at her curiously. They pushed through glass doors and patrolmen inside displayed interest. Weigand said “Homicide” and one of them jerked a directing thumb.