Death of an Angel (8 page)

Oxalic acid was readily obtainable at any pharmacy. It was used as a bleach by workers in leather, marble and brass. It was used to clean straw hats and remove ink stains. It was used for cleaning bricks. In appearance, it was crystalline and resembled Epsom Salts. It had a bitter taste. There was little point in seeking to determine the source of the crystals used, at least until there was more to go on.

Fitch had got home the night before at some time undetermined, but after two a.m. The night elevator operator, who went off duty at that hour, leaving further ascents and descents to the control of tenants, was pretty certain he had not taken Mr. Fitch up before he left. Fitch had been host at a party at “21” the night before—a party, it appeared, got up more or less on the spur of the moment. The party had not so much ended as dwindled away, seeping, as time went on, from the private room in which it had started to the long bar downstairs, where it had lost identity.

A cat had been in Fitch's bedroom and in his study. The police vacuum cleaner had picked up its long, black hair.

The telephone rang. “He's just come in, Loot-I-mean-captain,” Sergeant Mullins reported. It was then a little before nine. Bill Weigand drove the few blocks to the hotel in a Buick convertible with the top down, not looking particularly like a policeman. In the lobby, he joined Mullins, who did. Samuel Wyatt said, “Sure, come on up,” on the telephone, and they went on up. Wyatt had a corner suite. He wore a sports shirt and slacks. He said, “Come on in. Something turned up?” They went in.

“One or two points,” Bill said. “How's your cold, Mr. Wyatt?”

“Cold?” Wyatt said. “What makes you think I've got a cold, captain?”

“When I talked to you earlier I thought you had,” Weigand told him.

Wyatt began to shake his head.

“I don't—” he said, and ended, “oh,
that
.”

Bill Weigand nodded. He said, “Right.”

“Not a cold,” Wyatt said. “Allergy. The housekeeper's got a cat, apparently.” He looked at Weigand, and his eyes narrowed and he snapped his fingers. “Is it supposed to prove something?” Wyatt asked, in a slightly different voice. “If so, what? You know I was in the apartment—hell, I was there when you talked to me.”

“In the anteroom,” Bill said. “Not actually in the apartment, Mr. Wyatt. But you had been, I realize that.”

“Hell,” Wyatt said. “I found the poor guy, didn't I?”

“These symptoms,” Bill said. “They come on quickly, Mr. Wyatt? Within a few minutes?”

“That's right,” Wyatt said. “Dropped in on some friends the other night and I hadn't been there five minutes—” He broke off. He snapped his fingers. “Sure,” he said. “The Norths. Friends of yours, aren't they? They started you on this?”

“In a way,” Bill said.

“Friends of
mine
,” Wyatt said. “Talkative, aren't they?”

“Not particularly,” Bill said. “Any reason they shouldn't be? About this?”

“Hell, no,” Wyatt said. “Everybody knows me knows about this. Get it from anything on four legs, damned near. No secret.”

“Then,” Bill said, “these symptoms—what are they, by the way?”

“Runny nose,” Wyatt said. “Sneezing. Running eyes. Gets so bad, if I let it, I damned near can't breathe.”

“Right,” Bill said. “It comes on fast. You went into Mr. Fitch's apartment this morning and almost at once you began to have difficulties?”

“Within a few minutes,” Wyatt said. “Doesn't start all at once, of course. What's all this about?”

“In the anteroom,” Bill said. “Outside the apartment proper. Where the elevator—”

“I know where you mean,” Wyatt said. “Where you asked questions.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “Where we talked. The symptoms didn't seem so severe, then. Not as you describe them.”

“Clears up pretty quick sometimes,” Wyatt said. “Also, I'd been waiting around for a while. Cat doesn't get out there, apparently.”

“No,” Bill said. “Then why, I wonder, Mr. Wyatt, did Mrs. Hemmins think you had a cold—
when she opened the door to let you in?
”

For an instant, Bill thought, Wyatt's eyes went blank. But of this he could not be sure. Then Wyatt's eyes widened, his eyebrows went up, his long face was all surprise.

“I don't know why she'd say that,” Wyatt said. “Must have got things mixed up. It started after I got inside. Where this cat had been.” He snapped his fingers, absently. “Hell,” he said, “whatever it is doesn't come through a closed door.”

He looked intently at Weigand. He said, “What
are
you getting at, captain?”

“Before you got there,” Bill told him, “there was someone on the floor above. With Mr. Fitch. With him when he took poison. Probably gave him the poison. And—the cat had been up there recently, Mr. Wyatt.”

There was a longish pause.

“So,” Wyatt said then. “Well,
I
hadn't, captain. This missus—what did you say her name was?” Bill told him. “She's got it mixed up.”

“Perhaps.”

“I'd settle for that,” Wyatt told him. “Pretty much have to, won't you? I say one thing. She says another. Doesn't get you anywhere, does it?”

“It raises a question,” Bill told him.

“And—I've answered it. I didn't poison the polo player.”

“And you weren't on the second floor?”

“Sure I was. I went up with this Mrs. Hemmins and—”

“You know what I mean. Before that.”

“No.”

The answer was unhesitating.

5

Saturday, 11:00
P.M.
to Sunday, 12:20
A.M.

They had not let it stop there. For more than an hour after Sam Wyatt's unhesitating denial that he had gone alone to the second floor of Fitch's duplex, they had taken him over it. But it could not be argued that they had made perceptible progress.

Wyatt had no convenient proof that he could not have been at the apartment some time before he rang the downstairs doorbell and was let in by Mrs. Hemmins—could not have been in Fitch's study, and Fitch's serving pantry, long enough to have concocted, and served, the “eye-opener” which had permanently closed Bradley Fitch's eyes; could not, with the poison's effect already apparent, have left that floor, gone down in the automatic elevator, got himself readmitted. He said that he had left his apartment and walked the few blocks to the Park Avenue apartment house, that he had gone up immediately and rung immediately, and been let in by Mrs. Hemmins within a few seconds.

But he could not prove this. He had not kept precise track of time. He had not, so far as he knew, been noticed going out and, while this would be checked, checking would hardly help. (It is seldom that anyone says, “Oh, there goes Mr. Jones. It is now precisely ten-eighteen and one half.”) He had not, walking that day quiet streets of Manhattan's upper East Side, encountered anyone he knew. He had not seen the doorman at the Park Avenue apartment house. “Probably off getting someone a cab.”

Wyatt had been entirely reasonable. He had appeared entirely co-operative. Several times, he expressed regret that he could not be more helpful. Once he said, obviously, that had he known about all this in advance, he would have used a stop-watch. “Except I haven't got one.”

He had been equally reasonable about the cocktail napkin with the neat “N” in a corner. He had not, at first, recognized the napkin. Prompted, he had agreed that (if the captain said so) it might well be a belonging of Mr. and Mrs. North, and that he might, absentmindedly, have put it in his pocket when he left their apartment the evening before. He had done things like that before. This time, he might very easily have done it. “All I was thinking of was getting out of there.
Three
cats.”

He was surprised that the napkin had been found in Fitch's study. He didn't see why he would have left it there. But, again, he had not been precisely calm, precisely himself. “Hell, the poor guy was lying there dead. You walk in on something like that and—” He might have taken the napkin out of his pocket without knowing it, might have dropped it on the floor. It had been on the floor?

“On a table,” Bill had told him.

On a table, then. Anywhere. Only—he didn't remember anything about it, one way or another. All he knew was, if it was there, and he had carried it there, he had left it when he had been there with Mrs. Hemmins, when they had found Fitch dead. Because that was the only time he had been there—the only time he had ever been there.

He admitted, he had said, having dinner with the Norths at the Plaza, seeing Fitch come in with that cousin of his—“Woman tried to get me to make a speech at some club”—that it would be all right with him if someone put poison in Fitch's soup. Something like that—whatever the Norths said. He didn't question what they said.

But as for meaning anything like that—
really
meaning anything like that—He had snapped his fingers; he had said, “Oh, come now, captain. What the hell?” People said things like that. They didn't mean them. If they did mean them, they didn't say them. Hadn't Weigand ever said, perhaps about some—oh, some politician he thought a menance—“Too bad somebody doesn't knock off that Joe Whatever's-his-name?” without meaning to suggest the desirability of any such action? Merely as a manner of speaking?

“No,” Bill had said, to that.

Well, a good many people did. Perhaps the captain was an exception. Reasonable he should be, in his business.

“Fitch irritated me,” Wyatt had said. “I don't deny that. The whole thing irritated me. It was all so damned pointless. So damned—well, I guess arrogant is the word. And, I lose what's to me a lot of money. Because some spoiled polo boy—” He stopped. “Keep forgetting the poor guy's dead,” he said. “Anyway—that's all it was. I was just sore. I'd had a couple of drinks. Let it show. It didn't mean—that!” He snapped his fingers, snapping it off.

For all the finger snapping, Wyatt had been calm, been reasonable, throughout. There was only, to raise doubt, that instant when his eyes had gone blank. Or, had they gone blank? Bill Weigand could not be sure. He drummed his fingers lightly on the desk at which he sat, in his temporary office of the Homicide Squad, Manhattan East.

“For my money,” Mullins said, “he's lying.”

“For your money he killed Fitch?”

Mullins hesitated a moment. Then he said, “I guess so. He's covering up. So—” He stopped. “We've not got a lot to hang it on,” he said. “Cats. And whether a guy had a cold before or after.” Mullins shook his head. He said it would be nice, sometime, to have a good pro kill.

They couldn't, Bill said, a little absently, have everything. They—

The telephone rang. Bill answered, identified himself. He said, “Why, yes,” and, after another moment, “Right.” He hung up. “As soon as I can.”

“The girl,” he said. “Miss Shaw. Wants to see somebody. She sounded frightened.”

Gerald North became, dimly, conscious that something was amiss. From the depths of sleep, from the stillness and the darkness of the depths, he bobbed to the surface and floated there restlessly, half in sleep and half out of it. There were recurrent waves, on which he bobbed. A wind was rustling in something and something creaked in the wind. He was a fish and his native habitat was water but now he was in the air, and he gulped for the water which he breathed and—

“Oh, dear,” Pam said. “Oh, dear.”

“Guh-sleep,” Jerry said, still largely asleep himself.

“Tossing and turning,” Pam said, and this time it was more clear. “
And
twisting.”

“Guh—” Jerry began, and said, loudly and excitedly, “What's the matter! What—”

“Oh, dear,” Pam said. “I didn't mean to.”

Jerry sat up in bed. He looked at the neighboring bed, and there was enough light for him to see Pamela. She was not tossing and turning, but lying very quietly on her back, looking at the ceiling. She had, however, thrown back the sheet and summer blanket, no doubt during the process of twisting. The short nightgowns she had recently adopted were, Jerry thought—now no longer dimly—most becoming.

“I really tried not to,” Pam said, and turned to look at him. “I know how you hate to be waked up.”

“Well,” Jerry said. “No more than most people.”

“Oh,” Pam said, “I'm sure, much more. Although, of course, I don't wake up other people much. I thought you were never going to. That is, for all I was trying not to, I—” She paused. She sat up in bed. “All right,” she said. “I got very lonely. All this to worry about, and no one to help.”

Jerry switched on the light between the beds.

“I still don't understand why you don't get cold,” Pam said.

“The difference,” Jerry told her, and looked at her, and was not wide awake, “is immaterial.” He looked again. “Singularly,” he added. “Do you want a cigarette?”

“A cigarette would be fine,” Pam said. “We forgot the stocky man. And we practically sicked Bill on poor Mr. Wyatt.”

Jerry sat on the edge of his bed to light Pam's cigarette, and then his own. He sat back on the bed, leaning against the pillow.

“What stocky man?” he said.

“The one we forgot to tell Bill about, of course.”

“The—” Jerry began, in a tone of enforced quiet. “Oh, the one at the bar?”

“And at the party,” Pam said. “The one who stalked. The one with Miss Shaw. And—the very night before somebody killed Mr. Fitch. Don't you
see?
”

“No,” Jerry said. “He was her cousin.”

“It was,” Pam said, “hardly worth while waking you up. Her cousin, indeed!”

“Well,” Jerry said. “Somebody said he was.”