Death Takes a Bow (14 page)

“Somebody,” he said, “goes to all the trouble of stealing the lecture notes. A little dark man, presumably. He finds out they aren't what he wants. So what does he do? Throw them away? No, he goes to a lot of trouble to see that I get them back, but in exchange he steals the notes I made this evening. Which won't do him any good that I can see. What kind of a murderer is that?”

“I don't know,” Dorian said. “Maybe it isn't one. Maybe it's somebody who's just—sort of curious.”

“He's sure as hell curious,” Weigand said. “He's curious in a big way.”

“Will your notes do him any good?” Dorian wanted to know.

Weigand said he couldn't think of any. They were merely jottings, taken to fix in his mind certain points he thought might prove important. They amounted to a kind of summary of the verbatim notes Mullins had taken. Gaining them did the intruder no good that Weigand could think of, and did him no harm.

“Beyond the considerable embarrassment,” he said, grinning without great amusement.

They thought about it.

“All I can see,” Dorian said, “is that it's somebody who wants to keep abreast of things. Know how the investigation is going, and what people say. And—” She broke off, and looked puzzled.

“And,” Bill finished for her, “wants me to keep abreast of things, too. Or he wouldn't have returned the lecture notes.”

“Maybe,” Dorian suggested, “it's another detective. From a rival firm.”

She said it lightly and then stopped rather suddenly and looked at her husband with an intent expression. He looked back, touched his bruise, reflective, and said, “Ouch!” Then he heard her.

“A rival firm,” he repeated, and their eyes shared a theory. “Now do you suppose there's a rival firm interested in Mr. Sproul? Who just came out of Paris on the run?”

Then his eyes held a doubtful expression.

“It doesn't figure,” he said. “Because this guy's being helpful. To me. He wants me to read Sproul's notes.” He looked at them. “So,” he said, “I guess I'd better do what he wants.”

Pamela North awakened first and reached for the watch on the table between the beds. The watch said it was 8:15. Pamela thought herself over and decided that she felt fine.

“I think I'll get up,” she announced and waited. There was a little pause and then Jerry, from a long distance off, said, “Huh?”

“I think I'll get up,” Pam North repeated.

“Do,” Jerry said. “Come back in an hour and let me know how it works out.”

“It's almost nine o'clock,” Mrs. North told her husband. “Aren't you going in today?”

“Later,” Mr. North said. “A good deal later, please. Because—oh, damn!”

“What?” Mrs. North said. “Damn what?”

“Sproul,” Mr. North told her. “Or—I don't mean Sproul really.”

“No,” Mrs. North said. “That's out of our hands. You mean about Sproul.”

“I'll have to tell them at the office,” Mr. North said. “They'll be—”

“Interested,” Mrs. North said. “Don't they read the papers?”

“—upset,” Mr. North finished. “Obviously, darling. But they'll expect me to mention it. I mean, our most popular author dies on a lecture platform just after I've introduced him and I'll have to say something about it, obviously. Something like, ‘By the way, too bad about poor old Sproul, wasn't it. You could have knocked me over with the gavel.' Something like that. Oh, lord!”

“What?” Mrs. North said, preparing to get up.

“The number of times I'll have to tell all about it,” Jerry North said, with a slight moan in his voice. “From T. G. down.”

“To Y. Z.,” Mrs. North suggested, stepping out of pajamas and looking at herself in the long door mirror. “I'm gaining again, I'm afraid. What happened to A. B.?”

“Fired,” Mr. North said, looking at her appreciatively. “I don't see it.”

“Here,” Mrs. North said, slapping herself there. “I always liked to think of A. B. up there, busy as—”

“All right,” Mr. North told her. “Not before breakfast. Anyway, I think it's something to throw to the nieces.”

“Oh, lord!” Mrs. North said. She stood on one foot, ready to put the other through her girdle, and stared at Mr. North. “I forgot all about them.” She looked at him reproachfully. “I was feeling so good,” she added. “And you brought up the nieces.”

“Really, Pam,” Jerry said. “I didn't.”

Pamela North finished with the girdle, wriggling.

“They're nice, of course,” she said. “And I love them. I guess. Only a whole day with the nieces. Fighting off sailors, probably. Why do you suppose sailors?”

“Sailors are fine,” Jerry told her. “I was a sailor once.”

“You must have been cute,” Pam said. “I wish I'd known you then.”

“Nobody knew me then,” Mr. North said, morosely. “Even my best friends. They're nice girls, Pam. A little—well, maybe a little inexperienced. If they happen to run into a—well, a troublesome sailor they'll scoot for home. And most sailors will understand. Even if they do look older.” He paused. “Beth particularly,” he noted. “She's—appreciably older.”

“Yes,” Mrs. North said, “except maybe her mind. And you and Bill will be hunting murderers and I'll just be showing the nieces Grant's Tomb. Do you suppose they'll like Grant's Tomb?”

“No,” Jerry said. “Try Twenty-one. Or the Algonquin bar.”

“I always feel under water in the Algonquin bar,” Mrs. North noted, finishing a second stocking and twisting to see the seam in the mirror. “And anyway, not bars.”

Jerry said he supposed not and swung out of bed.

“I still think you ought to get cold,” Mrs. North observed, looking at him. “No, I suppose not bars. What do you really think about my Mrs. Williams theory.”

We hadn't, Jerry told her, been thinking about it at all. He would. He paused, clad now in shorts, and assumed an expression of thought.

“Not much,” he said.

“No,” Pam said. “It doesn't seem so good this morning. But still—Still, it was funny. And one funny thing leads to another.”

Murder, Jerry pointed out, wasn't funny. Pam told him not to stickle.

“Strange,” she said. “Abnormal. Twisted.”

Jerry North really thought about Mrs. Williams. The word “twisted” seemed to have started him.

“Assuming,” he said, “that you haven't made a mistake, that it was really Mrs. Williams you saw.” He nodded at Pam. “And I think it was,” he said, rather hurriedly. “I know you don't make mistakes, of that kind. Assuming it was Mrs. Williams, it does indicate that Mrs. Williams isn't what she appears to be.”

“What she's arranged to appear to be,” Pam told him. “Because if ever I saw a woman who arranged—”

“Arranged to appear to be,” Mr. North agreed. “But it would be easy to carry the assumption too far. Anywhere you'd carry it, without knowing more, would be too far. Maybe she's just a girl with a yen, who has another side to face the world with. As per Browning. Maybe it's just another instance of murder—of any sudden, violent, interruption of ordinary things—cutting through lives and showing you cross-sections.”

He looked at Pam, who was pulling her dress down. It was a sheer woolen dress in pale orange. Or something Mr. North decided he would call pale orange. Pam looked at herself in the mirror.

“Probably,” she said. “I smell bacon. Martha's here.” She looked at Jerry thoughtfully. “Still,” she said. “You'll have to admit that it's funny about Mrs. Williams. Whatever you say. It's a discrepancy.”

Jerry said all right, it was a discrepancy. He plugged in his electric razor, and its buzz shut him off from the outer world. Pam watched him for a moment and went out of the bedroom. The table was set up in the dining room corner of the living room, and set properly for four. In the kitchen there was a reassuring sound of pans in action. Pamela looked in.

The nieces sat side by side on a single chair, which was the only chair available, and watched Martha, with anticipation. The two young cats sat on the floor, their tails wrapped carefully around them, and looked up at Martha hopefully. It was, Pam decided, a pretty picture.

“But tautological, somehow,” she said. “They all look just the same, essentially. I'll certainly have to keep an eye out for strange dogs.”

“Aunt Pam,” Beth said. “It's raining. What do we do today?”

It was, Pam admitted to herself, a question. She found an unexpected answer.

“One thing,” she said, “I'm going to take you to lunch at a very interesting place.”

“That will be nice,” Margie said, politely.

Nice wasn't, Pam thought, precisely the right word for the Roundabout. But it wouldn't be un-nice, at least for luncheon. It wasn't, of course, really a luncheon place. It was merely a point from which a wild goose chase might be started.

“But,” Pam said to herself, “I've got to begin somewhere. Because I still think there's something in it.”

She looked at the nieces. They were darlings, of course. But they were obviously going to cramp her style.

Lieutenant Weigand drove to his office morosely, through driving rain. He wanted more sleep, his head ached and he felt peculiarly incompetent. He also felt a grumbling desire to get his hands on the man—little and dark, or large and pale—who had provided both the headache and the conviction of inadequacy. He picked up newspapers and carried them to his office and regarded them without favor. Even with the war, the sudden and mysterious death of Victor Leeds Sproul was being well noticed. Top heads, front page, even in the
Times
. That would make Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley sit up and take notice.

Weigand sat down, rubbed his head reflectively and spread out the lecture notes which his assailant had left in exchange. Fair exchange hell, Weigand told himself. I owe him a large bump. He felt his bump. A very large bump, he told himself. The telephone rang. Weigand said, “Yes, Inspector,” into it and went down the corridor to beard O'Malley. O'Malley said it looked as if he'd got into something.

“Again,” the Inspector added, puffing a little. He regarded the lieutenant with accusation. “See those Norths are still around,” he remarked. “Maybe we'd better swear them in.”

It was, Weigand told him, mere accident. It simply happened. O'Malley said it seemed to happen a good deal. The thought evidently did not amuse O'Malley, who continued to look upon Weigand without affection. Then Inspector O'Malley rallied.

“All right,” Inspector O'Malley said. “Got to get on with it, Lieutenant. Let's have it.”

Weigand let him have it. He omitted the invasion of the night. There was no use upsetting O'Malley. When he finished, O'Malley looked at him and said, “What the hell?”

“He bumped himself,” O'Malley announced. “Whoever heard of morphine in a homicide?”

Weigand pointed out that it was an odd way to commit suicide—an odd time and an odd place; an action oddly without reason so far determined.

“You think somebody got him?” O'Malley wanted to know. “It's a hell of a lot funnier way to kill somebody.”

Weigand agreed with that. Still, considering everything, he thought it was murder. He realized that he was holding back; that he had been sure it was murder ever since things had gone bump in the night. But there are some things about lieutenants that inspectors should never learn. The inspector would not like to hear that somebody had entered Weigand's apartment, knocked out Weigand and Mrs. Weigand, and gone his way at leisure. It would arouse doubts in the inspector. It aroused doubts in Weigand.

“They're giving it a play,” O'Malley noticed, waving at a newspaper on his desk. “Quite a play, considering. We won't look so bright if it turns out suicide.”

O'Malley liked to look bright in the newspapers. He liked sentences which began: “Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley of the Homicide Squad, in charge of the investigation of the death of Victor Leeds Sproul, said today—” He regarded it as the duty of Acting Captain Weigand to provide him with appropriate things to say. It was the role of an acting captain.

“It's murder,” Weigand told him.

O'Malley hinted that Weigand had better be right. He said that, assuming it was murder, who? This—this Bandelman Tchung?

“Jung,” Weigand said. “Not Tchung.”

The inspector looked at him aggrieved.

“Call that a name?” he wanted to know.

Weigand shook his head.

“I think he made it up,” he agreed.

“He's your man,” O'Malley said, with conviction. “Bandelman Tchung. My God!”

You couldn't, Weigand pointed out, arrest a man merely because you didn't believe in his name. O'Malley, red of face, rectified this misconception. You could arrest a man for anything and make him spill it. In the old days—The trouble with you young cops is—

“Baby 'em,” O'Malley said. “That's what it is. Baby 'em. When I was your age, Bill—”

Weigand listened with expressions of interest. At proper moments he nodded. When once O'Malley paused for a word, Lieutenant Weigand provided it. “Squeamish.” Several times Weigand said, “Right.” After a time O'Malley quieted himself.

“Well,” he said, “what're you going to do? Sit here all day passing? Get on with it, Lieutenant. Get on with it!”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Any special lines?”

Did he, O'Malley wanted to know, have to do everything himself? Did he have to lead Weigand by the hand?

“Right,” Weigand said. Arty was in fine form. It cheered Weigand to discover in O'Malley an unchanging verity. Weigand left. O'Malley lighted a cigar, put his feet up, and returned to the sports pages.

Weigand stared at Sproul's lecture notes. He laid them aside and stared at reports, which were incomplete. Unless Loretta Shaw had gone out of a rear window of her apartment in Bank Street and climbed down a fire escape ladder, she had not showed up around 3 o'clock to slug Bill Weigand and Dorian. She was accounted for, the accounting rendered by a detective who had got himself surprisingly wet in the process. It had begun to rain at around 4 o'clock, if Headquarters was interested. Jung was back in his lodging in a rooming house in the West Forties, but it was not quite clear when he had arrived. Somebody had slipped up, there. The others—the Akrons, Schwartz, Burden, Ralph White and such unlikely sluggers as Mrs. Paul Williams and Dr. Dupont, might have done anything, having been unobserved.