A Pinch of Poison (4 page)

“Oh,” Mrs. North said, “I remember that. I was thirteen.” She looked confident a moment, and then her confidence clouded. “Only,” she said, “did I really start in kindergarten, or right in the first grade? I don't seem to remember kindergarten, really.”

“Try to,” Mr. North asked her, eagerly. There was a kind of desperation in his eagerness. “Raffia,” he suggested. “Making little rag rugs on a little loom.” He cast around anxiously in his mind. “Blocks?” he begged. Mrs. North shook her head.

“Sometimes I think I do,” she said. “And then sometimes I think it is just what somebody told me. I don't know really, Jerry.” She looked at him. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It really doesn't matter, Jerry.”

“It's perfectly absurd,” Mr. North said. “Of course we can find out how old you are. Just with a few facts and some logic. We—” He looked at Weigand. “Find out, Bill,” he urged. “You're a detective.”

Weigand shook his head, and said there were limits. Mrs. North made a face at him.

“Well,” Weigand said, “how old were you when you graduated from high school, Pam? That might tell us.”

“Seventeen,” Pam said.

“And what was your class?” Weigand said. “You know, the dear old class of something or other. What was it?”

Everybody waited, anxiously. Including Pam. Then she shook her head.

“I don't know,” she said. “I really don't.” She looked at the others a little defensively. “I'm just not any good at dates,” she said. “I mean—dates that are now. I was very good in history, though.”

She looked at all of them, and said she was sorry.

“It doesn't really matter,” she said. “I didn't mean to bring it up and worry everybody. I just wondered and—mentioned it. But there's no use trying to find out, because I'm just no good at dates.” She paused and looked at Jerry. “I'll tell you, Jerry,” she said. “I don't even remember the date we were married.”

Mr. North started to tell her, but she broke through.

“Only the day of the month,” she said. “I remember that. It was March 4.”

Dorian and Bill Weigand looked at Mr. North, who nodded.

“It was, for a wonder,” he said. He looked at his wife curiously.

“How do you come to remember that, Pam?” he asked.

“Because it's election day, of course,” Mrs. North said.

They were still looking at her, in pleased astonishment, when the telephone rang. Mr. North was the nearer and scooped it up. He greeted it and said “yes” and, after a moment, “yes” again. Then he said “of course” and handed the telephone to Weigand. Weigand said “right” and listened. Knowing him as the others did, they could see him stiffen as he listened, and Dorian Hunt, whose gray-green eyes smiled as if by themselves when they looked at Weigand, said, “Oh, dear!” softly. After what seemed a rather long time, Bill Weigand said “right” again and put the telephone back in its cradle.

Weigand sat a moment, looking at the others, and then he smiled. It was rather a detached smile, as if its sponsor was thinking of other things.

“Trouble,” he said. “And the police called in. So—I hate to break things up, Pam.”

“Murder?” she said.

Weigand looked at her a moment.

“Well,” he said, “it might be. That's where I come in, of course. Up on the Ritz-Plaza roof, a young woman.” He looked from Pam to Dorian, thinking aloud. “It's an odd thing, apparently,” he said. “She seems to have had too much to drink, and passed out. Only when she passed out, she was dead—just like that. Which worried the hotel doctor. And the ambulance surgeon, when he came. And that worried the precinct. Therefore—”

“Oh,” Mrs. North said. “A young woman? Dancing?”

“I don't know, Pam,” Weigand said. “She could dance there, couldn't she? They didn't say.”

“It seems to—” Mrs. North said. She broke off for a moment. “Well,” she said, “it won't be anybody we know, anyway. Not this time.”

Weigand smiled.

“No,” he said, “you and Jerry have had a bit more than your share. This isn't one that will bother you; no detecting for the Norths this time. We'll just find out who killed Miss Winston and let you know.”

He stopped, partly because Mrs. North was staring at him.

“Winston!” she repeated. “Now, listen, Bill—not Lois Winston?”

The other three looked at her, but this time differently.

“Now don't tell me—” Weigand began. Mrs. North held up a hand.

“Was it a Lois Winston?” she demanded. They looked at Bill Weigand, who nodded slowly.

“Right,” he said. “Lois Winston. Lives off Park Avenue somewhere. Money. Social Register. That's why the precinct—”

“Then,” Mrs. North said, with a kind of detached resignation, “I do know her. Or know of her, anyway. She works for the Foundation.”

“Works?” Weigand repeated. “She didn't sound like it. She sounded like money, and all that.”

Mrs. North nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “That part's all right. But just the same, she worked for the Foundation. A volunteer, I think—anyway, she—”

Weigand broke in.

“I've got to get along,” he said. “But perhaps I'd better hear this. Do you want to ride up with me, Pam, and tell me the rest of it as we go?”

“Well—” Pam said, doubtfully—“I—oh, all right, Bill. Only I don't like it. Remember about Jerry's arm. And about my neck.” She looked at him, rather darkly. “Remember, Bill?” she said. Bill nodded.

“Bring Jerry to look after you,” he said. “Only you're not going to get into this one—nor is Jerry, nor are you, Dorian. It's just a chance to pick up some information without wasting time. Come on.”

“All of us?” Dorian asked.

“Why not?” Weigand wanted to know. “I won't make you into a policewoman, Dor. Except maybe by—”

“All right, Bill,” Dorian said. “Hold it, Loot.”

“And,” Mrs. North said, “remember how Dorian got almost—”

“Yes, Pam,” Bill said. “I'm not forgetting. We'll be very careful of all of you. Are you coming?”

They went, of course. Weigand's Buick, with red lights blinking in front and with the siren speaking low at crossings, went north. Pam sat beside the driver, now very officially Lieutenant William Weigand, acting captain in the Homicide Bureau of the New York Police Department. It was also a somewhat different Mrs. North. Not for the first time, Weigand noted with underlying surprise how quickly cogent she could be when she wished.

She knew little about Lois Winston at first hand, it developed. She thought she had seen her once in the offices of the Foundation—the Placement Foundation, in West Twenty-ninth Street. “I'm on the committee,” she said. “Names. Sometimes benefits. That sort of thing. Jerry sends a check now and then, too.” In addition, Pam North was interested in the work itself. “They place children for adoption,” she said. “Orphans, foundlings, children whose parents can't care for them and ask help—that sort of thing.” As a result of her interest, she had got to know Mary Crane, who was the secretary.

“She's a professional,” Pam explained. “Only don't think of social workers in tweed skirts and flat-heeled shoes, looking under the beds for dirt. This place isn't like that. And Mary Crane isn't.”

“I know,” Weigand said. “I've met them around. Go on.”

Pam, she told him, had once thought of doing volunteer work herself, but abandoned the idea because—“Oh,” she said, “because of a lot of things. They don't matter.” She had asked Mary Crane about it and Miss Crane had been encouraging. They did, she had told Pam, now and then use volunteers; in rare instances, if the volunteers were exceptional and were willing to keep on through a long training period, and sometimes study in addition at the New York School of Social Work, they used volunteers for investigations and in other responsible capacities. Then Miss Crane had cited Lois Winston as an example—a girl who had been with them five years, who worked merely because she wanted to do something which would help people, who took the hours and the tasks of the professional workers but not the salary; who took, also, the routine and the supervision and the exacting personal responsibility which went with the job.

“She thinks—thought—a lot of Lois Winston,” Mrs. North said. “You could tell by the way she spoke of her. Although it had raised problems, of course.”

“What problems?” Weigand said, letting the siren snarl warning at a car which had injudiciously poked its nose from a side street. The nose withdrew precipitately.

“Well,” Pam explained, “to most of the workers it's a job, of course. They are professionals—in that profession, usually, because they want to do something useful, but making their livings by it all the same. And when a volunteer comes in, they are inclined to resent it. Although, Miss Crane says, it merely means one more worker, usually; it doesn't put anybody out of a job.”

“Then why—?” Weigand said.

Pam North said she didn't know, in detail. Naturally, Miss Crane had not told her in detail. She had merely let something drop. Pam added that there might, of course, be nothing to it; that, almost surely, there was nothing to it.

“I merely gathered,” she said, “that about the time Lois Winston went on the staff—got to be a regular worker, that is—they had had to let a professional worker go. For some other reason. But apparently the girl they fired didn't believe what they said, and thought that Miss Winston had—well, done her out of a job.”

“Well—” Weigand said, doubtfully.

“It's possible,” Pam pointed out, “that I've—oh, built all this up; made a story out of it—out of something Miss Crane let drop. I do, you know.”

She said it without apology, and not defensively. It was merely one of the things Pam North knew about Pam North, and expected others to know. Weigand nodded.

“It would have been five years ago, anyway,” he said.

In the next block, outside the Ritz-Plaza, green and white patrol cars nudged against the curb. He swung the Buick in among them. Weigand got out, and the others, a little doubtfully, got out behind him. Weigand looked as if he didn't know what to do with them.

“Go ahead,” Mr. North told him: “Forget us, if Pam's told you what you want to know. We may come up, though, and have a drink and look on. Now that we're here.”

“Oh,” said Pam. “Yes. On the murder roof.”

The Norths looked at Dorian.

“The three of you,” Dorian said, a little helplessly. Weigand looked at her, because it was fun to look at her. Even as she stood, not moving, she had that singular, poised grace which he had first noticed the autumn before when there was murder at Lone Lake and Dorian was in the thick of it, and he had abandoned a firm determination to continue a vacation. Weigand found, against all professional reasoning, that he hoped she would go with the Norths to the roof. He might get to see her again, for one thing. There really is a glint of red in her hair, Weigand decided, realizing that he should be thinking of Lois Winston.

“Oh, all right,” he heard Dorian say, and there was a warm center of contentment inside Lieutenant Weigand, somewhere as he crossed the sidewalk to the lobby. It persisted across the lobby and to the express elevator, marked “Roof Only,” at the end of a bank of elevators. A uniformed policeman was standing there, as if by accident. He saluted when Weigand came up and pressed a signal button. Weigand disappeared upward as the Norths and Dorian Hunt crossed the lobby. The policeman looked at them doubtfully. But he made no move to stop Mr. North when he, in turn, pressed the signal button. He merely looked at them curiously when the three entered the express elevator and followed Weigand toward what Mrs. North called, and what she said the newspapers would call in the morning, “the murder roof.” (The newspapers, as it turned out, were more considerate of the Ritz-Plaza. They merely called it the murder at the Club Plaza, which was obviously more polite.)

4

T
UESDAY

10:10
P.M.
TO
10:50
P.M.

But when William Weigand reached the restaurant on the roof at a few minutes before ten o'clock that night, there was not yet admittedly a murder. It was a “suspicious death,” and so entered on the blotter of the East Fifty-first Street police station and in the records of the Fourth Detective District. There was a girl in a blue flowered evening dress, caught with brilliants on each shoulder, and the girl was dead. The body lay on the bed where Lois Winston had died in the private suite of the roof's manager. The apartment, consisting of living-room and bedroom, opened off a corridor which led to the restaurant itself. When Weigand arrived, two doctors had looked at Lois Winston's body and a third was bending beside it.

There were several people in the living-room of the suite as Weigand passed through it to enter the bedroom. There were detectives from the district, and from the Homicide Bureau—these last waiting for Weigand's arrival—and several people Weigand had never seen before. He nodded to detectives and lifted his eyebrows at Detective-Sergeant Mullins, temporarily in charge of the Bureau detail. Mullins' face, which had been scarred by authority, relaxed. He said, “Hi-ya, Loot?” Lieutenant Weigand nodded and went into the bedroom. Dr. Jerome Francis, assistant medical examiner, stood up.

“Well, Doctor?” Weigand said. The doctor spread his hands.

“Well,” he said, “she's dead.”

“And?” Weigand said. Dr. Francis shrugged. It could, he said, be several things, some of them quite innocent.

“Right,” Weigand said. “But you don't think it is.”

“I think,” Dr. Francis said, “that she was poisoned. With one of the alkaloids. The hotel doctor—chap named Merton—thinks so, too. And he was here when she died.”